


ostinato

by kylieno



Category: Satan and Me (Webcomic)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, F/M, Psychological Trauma, Self-Harm, Suicide, Time Loop, terminal illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 01:59:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17674268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kylieno/pseuds/kylieno
Summary: [n. a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm]the road keeps bending back upon itself, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.





	1. part one

_“Do I dare_  
_Disturb the universe?_  
_In a minute there is time_  
_For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”_  

> _–T.S. Eliot, “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”_

* * *

(He doesn’t know it yet, but it begins when he sees a glimpse of skull and bone and the universe turns on its side like a spinning coin.)

Time has never held much meaning for him until he felt the clockwork gravity of the earth settle low in his stomach. The decades of human existence were like seconds, centuries mere blips in his periphery. It was nothing to him but an endless stream, ceaselessly rushing forward with no significant value. He stood in the rush of it, untouched.

Maybe this is why, as he wakes up at 8:24 in the morning with his breath stolen from his throat, lifeless green eyes flashing through his head, he thinks it’s a fluke.

He blinks warily at the bright flecks of sunlight splitting through Natalie’s partially covered window, streaking amber hues across her room. The sound of turning paper and soft breathing stifles the silence, and his eyes dart to the bed, searching for the flash of green eyes and ginger hair. Natalie is perched on her mattress with a box of tissues, idly reading over a chemistry textbook.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” She says, glancing up with a small grin. “You were out longer than I was.”

Her eyes are bloodshot and carrying dark circles underneath them, her nose is running, her lips are chapped, but her smile eases the tightness in his chest. She’s alive. She’s breathing.

The smile fades as she registers his expression that he can’t quite shift back to neutral. “Hey, dude, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he says automatically, tasting casino smoke and motel air and the tidal waves of grief that slammed into him when he saw her unmoving body. “Just a… nightmare, I think.”

“I didn’t know that you could dream,” she says, brows furrowing.

“I didn’t either,” He says , heaving himself off of the beanbag that had recently become his bed. “Until a couple weeks ago I couldn’t even sleep.” He stretches out his heavy limbs, the foreign yet not unwelcome feeling of rest settling into his bones. Natalie watches him with curious eyes.

“What did you dream about?” She asks suddenly, shifting her book to the side.

He remembers the red flourish of a cocktail dress, the clack of dice on dark wood, the salt-tinged air. He remembers her hazy eyes and labored breathing, and her still, small form laying underneath scratchy motel sheets.

He swallows. “Nothing important.”

Natalie, of course, doesn’t buy it; her lips immediately curve into a disbelieving frown. “It’s obviously bothering you. Was it about the fall? Oregon?”

Lucifer shakes his head. “Nothing like that. And even if it was, it’s none of your business.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “Excuse me if I’m concerned for my best frie–” a cough escapes her throat, cutting her off. She buries her head deep into her arm, her sharp hacking punctuated by rattling breaths.

Lucifer sits down beside her, awkwardly reaching out a hand to rub her back until her shoulders stop shaking and her breathing slows to some semblance of normal. She looks up at him with watery eyes and a dripping nose, and he wordlessly hands her the box of tissues.

“How did  _you_  sleep, kid?” He asks as she blows into the tissue, privately relieved for the opportunity to reroute the conversation.

“I’ve had better nights,” she replies, sniffling.

“Did you puke?”

“…Once,” she admits. “It’s not getting better.”

“Fuck,” he breathes. He clears his throat. “Well, you should eat something. You look like shit.”

“Thanks, I didn’t notice,” She says dryly. Her hands absently brush her thinning face, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “When are we going to the bus station?”

“As soon as I call in your replacement,” Lucifer says. “They’ll go to school and placate your dad for you.”

Natalie exhales, her shoulders drooping. “I feel bad. I’ve lied to him so much this year.”

Lucifer shrugs in reply. “Familial advice isn’t exactly my strong suit, kid, but if you think telling him you’re going on a road trip with the devil would be a good idea, go right ahead.”

Her nose wrinkles. “On second thought, maybe it’s a necessary evil.”

“Good, glad we agree on something,” he says, rising from her bed. “You better get dressed. And eat some soup or oatmeal or whatever.”

He leaves the room, hoping she can’t see the anxiety rippling above his skin like static.

* * *

She’s been strangely quiet since they left the house.

He glances at her uncharacteristically blank face, surreptitiously trying to piece together the thoughts that may be running through her head.  _Emotionless_  isn’t a good look on her; he’s far more used to her vibrant smiles stretching her cheeks wider than the sky, her bright eyes crinkling with amusement. Now they’re glassy with illness, fixed on a point that seems to be beyond the scope of human vision.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” She asks suddenly, seeming to snap out of her reverie. “I mean, how do you know I’m not just sick like normal?”

_A virulent case of the flu virus has overtaken most of the southern California cities…_

He wonders if he should tell her about the news clips playing on repeat in the living room, or his lucid dream of a day just like today, of this bus station and a casino and a motel bed eight hours away that she would lay down in and never get up from…

“Call it a hunch,” he says. (The lies feel like they’ve been spoken by his mouth before. He bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes poison.)

She raises an eyebrow. “We have to travel over eight hours by bus for a hunch?”

“I got you a cover, what more do you want from me?” He demands, irritation prickling on the back of his neck.  _An estimated 13,000 cases have been reported in just Santa Monica alone…_

She falls silent again, staring straight in front of her.

“Kid?”

She turns to look at him.

He forces himself to stare where she had been, crossing his arms. “It’s all taken care of, okay? There’s no point in stressing out about something that’s already done.”

“I guess so…” she says, pulling her knees up to her chest. “Hey, Satan?”

“Jeez,  _what_  already?”

“How come you’re doing this for me?” She asks. “I mean going this far? You love me or something?”

He jerks to face her, an irritating heat rising in his cheeks.

“What are you talking about, girl?” He asks, words tasting like sandpaper rising out of his throat. “I wasn’t even–”

“‘Cause I do,” she says, the sentence falling off her lips with something that sounds a little like urgency. Her eyes meet his, and she smiles.

“…What?” He manages to ask, his brain trying to process the phrase, to pick it apart into ulterior motives and lies but  _he can’t find any_.

“I love you, Lucifer,” She says, and her words are echoes of the nightmare he had last night, the one that ended when her heart stopped beating and it felt like pieces of him were crumbling until his soul was in ruins. 

Her voice is so, so gentle.

Like a dying empire, his walls start to collapse.

* * *

The spring heat is simmering, even as the sun dips below the coast and night begins to sink into the sky. He leans against the brassy desk in the casino lobby, arms folded tightly. It’s been at least thirty minutes since Natalie disappeared into the bathroom, a ball of crimson fabric tucked under her arm, but her absence gives him time to think.

He’s had déjà vu before, but as the day wears on, it seems more and more like he’s living in the reverberations of his nightmare, time doubling back on itself with nothing more than a ripple.

_Ugh, hurry up, girl! How long does it take to get changed in the bathroom?_

_I’m coming, I’m coming. Jeez, impatient._

He shakes away the dust of half-memories that cling to his mind. 

It’s not real. 

It was just a dream. 

It’s a  _fluke_.

“Well, I’m ready to do this, but I feel kinda…silly?” Her voice echoes through the empty lobby, and he turns to her, eyes widening. “This doesn’t feel like something I need to get dressed up for.”

Red looks good on her. 

The dress he had bought compliments her slim figure, hugging her waist and flowing out to just above her knees. The illusion strips the baby fat from her face, and the makeup she’s wearing emphasizes her large eyes and full lips. The golden light of the casino lets her hair shine like licks of flame.

She looks exactly like she did in his dream. A surge of dread pounds into his heart.

“This feels weird…Do I really need to do this?” She asks, placing a hand on her stomach, looking slightly uncomfortable. “I think I’m old enough to go into a casino, dude.”

It takes a moment for him to speak. “…Yeah. Well–but you can’t gamble. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, so it’s best to put this illusion up, girl. I’ll take it off when we leave. Until then, just bear with it, okay?” 

At her incredulous look, he sighs. “Is it really that terrible to be older for a day? Jesus, you act like you look bad or something. Let’s just get this over with.” He thrusts out his arm for her to grab. 

She seems to concede, taking it with one of her widest smiles.

“Oh, and kid?”

“Yeah?”

_Don't leave me. Don't leave me. Don't leave me._

“Don’t smoke any cigarettes. Your lungs are fucked up enough already.”

* * *

As soon as he enters the gaming room he sees her, dressed in a back-baring white dress, huddled over a table and casting dice like they were spells. (He tries not to think that she sat in that same barstool once upon a memory, that his eyes were automatically trained on her because they knew she would be there.)

He tugs a little on Natalie’s arm, jerking his head in the woman’s direction. “That’s her.”

Natalie perks up, looking curiously at the horseman of plague. “That was quick.”

“Yeah,” Lucifer says, narrowing his eyes. He pulls his arm out from Natalie’s grip and shoves his hands into his worn jean pockets. “Convenient. Just wander around and act natural while I talk to her.”

“What?” Natalie says indignantly, grabbing his sleeve as if to anchor him to her. “I want to go too!”

“Seriously, kid? No.” He jerks his arm away, giving her the most irritated glower he can muster. “What’s with you and your incessant need to gravitate towards things that’ll kill you?”

She sticks her tongue out at him, unfazed. “I deserve to know what’s going on; last time I looked,  _I’m_  the one who’s sick.”

He stares at her, gauging the little wrinkle in between her eyebrows, the stubborn set of her lips, her clenched fists. He sighs. “Fine, just keep a little distance from her, alright?”

Natalie nods slowly. “Okay.”

They walk toward her, the dirty red carpet seeming to stretch longer as they approach the gambling table. The murmur of the crowd is unsettling. Natalie coughs out the smoky air, and he can see tears forming in her eyes. He hands her a wad of tissues he had stuffed in his pocket, and she accepts one gratefully.

Pestilence doesn’t turn around, but she speaks before he or Natalie can even open their mouths.

“You know why I like gambling, Natalie McAllister?”

Natalie freezes. “Um…” she says, eyes wide.

“It’s because it’s just so  _interesting_  to see which way fate takes you each time you play,” she says, eyeing her cards with a sly smile. “Wouldn’t you agree, Stan?”

Lucifer’s lips curl down into a scowl, desperately trying to mask the panic crawling underneath his skin. “I have no clue what you’re talking about, lady.”

“No need to be rude,” She says, throwing down some cards. The rest of the players collectively groan a song of defeat. “You may call me Lola for the time being. Or Ms. Keens, if you prefer.”

He glares at her. “Come with me. I’d like to make a wager with you.”

He hears Natalie squeak with surprise, followed by a sharp cough. Pestilence doesn’t move from her seat.

“I think you’d be interested in what I have to offer this time,” He hedges.

“Well, you’re not  _wrong_ , per se,” She says, tapping her chin thoughtfully. “The book would be useful. However, I’d be more…enthusiastic if we were playing for  _that_.”

Lucifer stiffens. “How did you know I was offering–”

“Let me collect my winnings and I’ll meet you outside.” She turns around, eyes glinting. “You see, ‘Stan’, here’s a helpful little secret.”

She leans in closer, her whispered words like silk. “No matter how many times you play with chance, I’ll always come out on top.”

He doesn’t say anything in reply, just shrugs away the gooseflesh, turns around, and strides to the lobby, Natalie in tow.

He ignores her pointed questions and the meteoric pounding of his heart. Something is definitely wrong, a series of off notes and extraneous repetitions of time, scenes folded in half and mirrored like origami.

“Lucifer, stop.”

How did this happen? Is this really happening? Is she really going to die alone in a motel room, simply because he was  _too fucking stupid to notice–_

“Hey, stop walking!” Natalie yells, her voice reverberating through the hall. He turns to her. A few people look at them with thinly veiled annoyance, but she ignores them.

“What?” He asks, the pounding in his head almost as bad as the soft whispers of the souls he’d condemned. There’s a smudge of lipstick on the corner of her mouth where she pressed her hand to swallow down her coughing.She looks beautiful and furious and alive in the warm lighting.

(He remembers the unnatural pallor of her corpse, stark against her copper hair, and he feels the blood drain from his face.)

“You’re going berserk!” She says, wringing her hands together. “You’ve been acting strange all day and saying these weird things and giving me these weird looks and it’s seriously freaking me out!”

He heaves a sigh, dragging a hand down his face before letting it drop to his side. “I’m sorry. I’m fine, I promise.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” she says, coughing a little into her arm. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” he says. “Not right now.”

She frowns, reaches for his hand, and laces her fingers through his. 

“You know you don’t have to do things all on your own anymore, right?” She says gently. She lifts up their hands so he can see them, tightly intertwined. “Best friends, remember?”

“…Yeah, I remember,” he says, feeling her gaze burn like ethanol set alight. He can’t recall the exact moment that he became so myopic around her, but her brilliant smile lets everything else wither into static. 

For a moment, he lets himself have this.

For a moment, he tries to forget.

Pestilence’s smooth voice steals it away like dusk steals the day.

“Aw, you two are adorable,” She says from behind them. “Now, where were we?”

* * *

They’re in a grimy room, dim lights and dark walls making it seem even dirtier than it already is. To his vindictive satisfaction, Pestilence keeps her arms tightly folded against her dress, clearly uncomfortable with the filth. 

Natalie emerges from the bathroom, looking distinctly worse for the wear, red dress balled up in her fist. He nods at her before turning back to his opponent.

“We’re playing ‘Evens and Odds,’” Lucifer says, taking the dice out of his pocket and dropping. Pestilence barks out an astonished laugh.

“Are you sure you want to play this game? It didn’t work out so well for you last time.” She glances at Natalie. “My condolences, by the way. She seems like a sweet girl.”

“Huh?” Natalie whispers, confusion evident in her rasping voice.  

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, mouth dry, paranoia crawling into his vocal chords and squeezing them tight.

Pestilence smiles, sugary sweet. “I would advise you to save yourself the embarrassment of losing again and just give me the book.”

“What do you mean, ‘again’?” He asks, swallowing the answer that wants to tear out of his throat like a scream.

She huffs impatiently, blowing a stray strand of hair out of her eyes. “If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, you’re dumber than I thought, Lucifer.” She scrutinizes his pale face, the bead of sweat forming at his temple and her expression clears with understanding. “Or just trying to deny what you’ve been thinking this entire time.”

“Lucifer, what’s she talking about?” Natalie whispers, suppressed coughs fluttering under her words. 

“I’ll explain later,” He says hastily. Pestilence cocks an eyebrow at him. “After we play.”

“Alright, I’ll take odds then,” She says, smirking at him. 

_Seems a bit too simple, but alright. I’ll take evens._

Lucifer grits his teeth. “We’re playing for her health. Your roll.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Pestilence says, plucking the dice up with her perfectly manicured nails. He watches with disgust as she inspects them, smiling a little to herself. “You know I’m going to win.”

And of course, she does.

But he had to try.

If only for her.

* * *

He leans against the wall, staring into space. Natalie sits on the pavement, arms pulled into her stomach like she’s trying not to crumble into fragments of herself.

“I don’t understand how she did it,” Lucifer says, anger surging into him in brutal waves. He pushes himself off the wall and starts to pace aimlessly on the sidewalk, tugging on his hair. “She took evens last time and still won! How’s that even possible?”

“S-Satan,” Natalie breathes, voice cracking with exhaustion. 

“It’s okay. I’ll think of something else. This doesn’t have to happen–”

“Lucifer…”

He turns to her. “What?”

“Can we get…” She starts, pausing to breathe in heavily, “Can we get a hotel room or something? I don’t feel so good. I’m tired, dude.”

_You wanna get a…hotel room?_

He sees yellow wallpaper and green curtains and her body laying stiff and still in the morning light. He sees the redness under her eyes, her trembling hands, the staggered breaths that sound like she’s choking on her own lungs. He sees her  _dying_ , and he clenches his hands into fists.

“No,” he says.

“What?” She says, looking mildly affronted. 

“No,” he repeats. “We’re not going a hotel; I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“But…” she says weakly, stopping to let out a coughing spell that sounds more like drowning than anything else. Tears and sweat and snot run down her face, and when her body stops shuddering, she lets herself nod. “…Okay. Let’s go.”

* * *

He should have fucking known.

He and Natalie sit in the waiting room of the hospital, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder by the hoards of other patients waiting to see a doctor. 

_An estimated 13,000 cases have been reported in just Santa Monica alone…_

“Fuck,” he curses for what seems like the thousandth time, digging his fingers into his knees. An elderly woman sitting across from him shoots him a nasty look, but he just scowls and ignores the displeased glance. Natalie leans her head against his shoulder, her flu mask obscuring most of her face. Her eyes flutter, the temptation of sleep attempting to glue them shut. 

“You okay, kid?” He asks. She gives him a barely-there nod, coughing a little.

They’ve been edging on three hours of sitting here, and Lucifer is starting to itch with apprehension. Natalie seems to be getting exponentially worse, unlike the rest of the people waiting in this goddamn place. Perspiration is collecting on her hairline, and her coughs wrack her body into violent convulsions; she’s given up on trying to hold them in, instead gripping his shirt with white knuckles as her body tries to hack up her lungs. 

He glances at her, slumped against him in sheer exhaustion, eyes hazy and half-open. 

“I can get you some flu stuff if you want,” he says, a feeble offer. Her eyes trail toward him, and she nods again.

“’M gonna get water,” She mumbles, pressing a hand against him to help her rise from her seat. She stumbles a bit, and Lucifer automatically rises to steady her.

“I’m fine,” she says softly, voice muffled by her mask. He slowly sits back down.

She makes it about ten yards before she starts coughing again, doubling over, shoulders shaking with exertion. She whimpers, ripping her mask off and letting it fall to the floor. She’s not far behind. 

It’s almost as if he’s watching in slow motion as her knees buckle and her body slams against the tiles, limbs sprawled haphazardly on the ground. For a moment, everything is still.

Then time starts again and he’s out of the chair before he realizes, staggering towards her with hands outstretched. He vaguely hears someone scream, another call for help, but he can’t concentrate on anything but her limp form, unmoving on the cold hospital floor.

Oh, how he falls to her.

He drops to his knees, hands reaching to turn her over and he can’t feel her breathing under his palms. Her face is slack and beaded with sweat, a trail of red-yellow fluid dribbling down her chin. Her blue mask is lying limply on the tiles.

“Kid, get up,” he says numbly, ignoring the yells and the chatter and the humans in scrubs filing into the room with machines and a gurney. She doesn’t answer him.

“Natalie,” he pleads, cupping her cheek. There are hands pulling at him, pulling at her, prying his failing fingers off her shoulders. They place an oxygen mask over her face and gently lift her onto the stretcher.

“Wait,” he says, still kneeling on the floor, “wait.”

“Please wait here, sir,” says one of them, obviously trying to be reassuring. “We’ll get her the care she needs.”

He can’t listen to them; his eyes are fixed on her and the gurney rolling into the emergency room. He registers that someone is pulling him gently to another room, well furnished and brightly lit.

And he waits.

He stares at the doors as time ticks away on the clock overhead, digging his fingernails deeper into his skin. It seems like hours before they open again, and woman in scrubs steps in, face carefully composed. He stands up.

“We didn’t catch your name, sir,” she says, looking down at her clipboard.

“Stan,” he says curtly.

She looks up at him, eyes prompting him to speak more. “And your last name?”

“…Morningstar,” He says.

“Are you related to Ms. McAllister in any way, Stan?” She says softly.

“No.”

“How do you know her?”

He opens his mouth, but words fail him.

“Stan?”

“She’s…she’s my friend.”

“Does she have any relatives in the surrounding area?”

“No.”

“How long had she been sick?”

“A while. Two weeks, maybe.”

“Okay… Let’s sit down.”

He complies, collapsing back onto the chair. She sits on a couch across from him, not breaking eye contact.

“Our staff can’t reach her emergency contact, Stan. We were wondering if you would be able to call her father and have him come meet us here.”

“What’s going on?” He demands, glancing at the clock. 8:19 am.

The woman hesitates.

“What’s going on?” He repeats, raising his voice a little more.

She looks at him, pity engraved upon her features. “Natalie had developed complications from a secondary case of bacterial pneumonia in both of her lungs. It was interfering with her ability to deliver oxygen to her bloodstream, and by the time we were able to treat her she had gone into acute respiratory distress. Her organs were starting to shut down.”

“So?” He says, his voice deadly calm, like the glassy surface of a lake before it’s rustled by thunder.

“We put her on a ventilator, but…it doesn’t look good,” She says slowly. “Her brain was deprived of oxygen for too long. She’s not going to wake up.”

“What do you mean?” He asks blankly, and the words feel like poison on his tongue.

“I’m so sorry, but there’s nothing we can do. She’s brain dead.”

“No,” He says. There’s something in his eyes. “You’re kidding. No.”

He’s a former archangel, the devil himself, a figure larger than any of the tiny lives on this miserable planet, but he suddenly feels too small for this body he’s in. Something has his chest locked in a vice, and black dots swim in his vision, and maybe this is what suffocation feels like. He grabs the edge of the chair, trying to find his balance in a universe that’s seemed to have flipped, gravity the only thing anchoring him to the crust of the earth.

“Sir, are you okay?” The woman asks, reaching to him with concern.

“ _Don’t touch me,_ ” he snarls, and she jerks away from him in alarm. His eyes hurt and there’s something wet and hot trailing down his cheeks, and when he touches it he expects his fingertips to be coated in red but it’s only saltwater clinging to his skin.

“I didn’t mean for it to end like this,” he whispers, staring at the ground, clutching at his head like he can tear the ache out of it. “I didn’t want it to end this way.”

“No one ever does,” the nurse says gently. She pauses, and her next words are filled with confusion. “Sir, is there something wrong with your earrings?”

He looks up just in time to see her perplexed face and the ticking clock striking six minutes to half past eight and a dark figure standing behind her, sporting a wicked grin–

And the universe flips again, like a toss of the dice.

* * *

Lucifer opens his eyes at 8:24 in the morning, breath stolen from his throat, the white walls of hospitals and red hair sprawled against the tiles flashing through his head.

He clenches his teeth, looking around Natalie’s room.

It isn’t a fluke.

(It’s not even close.)


	2. part two

_“On earth, the terrible things  
_ _and the beautiful things  
_ _continue to happen beside each other.”_

> _–Jeffrey Morgan, “All Night No Sleep Now This”_

* * *

The first thing he sees is how the sun sets fire to the stray strands of hair that fall over her face, dust motes floating in the soft rays beaming through her window. The image seems to freeze in his vision, superimposed upon yesterday (today) and the day before that ( _today_.) They align like the stars in syzygy, each a perfect mirror of the other.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Natalie says, glancing up from her chemistry book. “You were out longer than I wa—” Her eyes widen as they meet his, mouth dropping open in shock. “Whoa, what’s up with your horns?”

“What do you mean?” He feels himself saying, gaze trailing on the steady rise and fall of her chest, the movement of her lips as she breathes.

She’s awake. She’s  _alive_.

She shoves her textbook to the side and heaves herself off the bed.

“They’re all…glowy and purple,” she says softly, poking one. He flinches away from her, and she retracts her hand in alarm. Natalie has never been frugal with physical contact, and over the months he had become used to her flopping onto him like he was a piece of furniture, playing with his hair, prodding at his horns until they shifted from amber to deep crimson. He doesn’t know why he moved away from her touch. Clearly, she doesn’t either; her face screws up into one of deep concern.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine. Perfect,” he says, standing up abruptly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’re acting a little weird,” she says, slowly rising with him, eyes still trained on his horns. “Are you nervous about going to the coast?” She glances at the clock on her dresser. “Speaking of, when are we leaving?”

“I’m fine,” Lucifer says, running a hand through his hair. She looks at him expectantly, but he doesn’t let any explanation fall from his lips.

“And… I’ve been thinking…” He says hesitantly, rubbing the back of his head. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea for you to go back. You should get your dad to take you to a hospital or something. I can do this alone.”

“What?!” Natalie says indignantly, “Why?”

“You’ve been living off of DayQuil and orange juice for over a week now, and even that’s iffy since you’ve been puking all over the place. It’s about time you get some professional help,” he says, eyes grazing over her chapped lips and the unhealthy pallor of her skin. Her face scrunches up in disapproval.

“Are you crazy?” She demands. “That’ll make my third hospital visit in the span of a year—my dad’ll  _flip_.”

“So you’re just gonna let yourself get worse so you don’t worry your old man?” Lucifer asks sharply, feeling anger boil in his stomach. He welcomes it, lets it wash over him like scalding water, and it’s so much easier to bear than the sadness. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Why do you care so much? It’s not like I’m dying or anything!” Natalie says, folding her arms.

The words twist like a knife in his heart, and he forces himself to keep the scowl on his lips.

“You don’t know that, kid, that’s why you go to a  _doctor_.”

They glare at each other for a few moments that seem to stretch into space. Natalie finally yields, slowly uncrossing her arms to have her palms rest surely on her hips.

“Okay, fine. You win,” she says. “But my dad’s not going with me.”

“I don’t see how that’ll work, kid,” Lucifer says. “He’s your emergency contact guy and you’re  _living with him_. He’s gonna find out no matter what.”

Natalie’s face breaks into a sly smile. “Unless…he’s already with me when I go.”

“What are you talking about? You just said you didn’t want to—” He cuts off as her smile grows wider.

“Wait—you mean—”

“Yup,” she says, eyes glinting. “That.”

* * *

The thin wire of Alex McAllister’s glasses feel odd on the bridge of his nose. He pushes them up slightly, takes them off, rubs them on his shirt, and puts them on again.

“Stop fidgeting,” Natalie whispers as they walk. “You look fine. Very dad-like. Middle aged and dorky.”

He turns to send a heated glare at her. She tilts her head in fascination. “Whoa, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that look on my dad’s face before. Usually he just cries when he’s mad at me.”

“Hopefully you never have to see it again,” Lucifer mutters with disgust, shaking his head. The sliding door of the emergency room opens, and he wrinkles his nose at the clinical smell. Fortunately, it’s not as crowded as the hospital by the coast was, with only a few stragglers sitting on the ugly green chairs.

He walks up to the front desk, Natalie trailing slightly behind him.

“My, uh…daughter needs an evaluation,” Lucifer says to the cheerful-looking woman behind the desk, barely suppressing a cringe at his own words.

“Hi,” Natalie says awkwardly, pausing to cough into her sleeve. The receptionist smiles sympathetically at her.

“Hello, dear. What’s your name?”

“Natalie McAllister.”

“Okay, Natalie, I’m going to need you to fill out this medical history form…”

He zones out as Natalie begins to scribble on the piece of paper she was given, letting the off-white walls and burning smell of chemicals fade away.

_What’s happening here?_

The past two days feel like vivid nightmares, fragments of memory that he clutches onto with unrivaled panic. He remembers her warm words and her hair like fire, and the way she burned out as the day ended, the way her life was snuffed as easily as one might blow out a candle.

He glances at her, sick but still lively, flashing smiles to the receptionist as she chatters. It seems absurd to think that in the span of twenty four hours she would deteriorate so much…

He has to find out what’s going on.

“Mr. McAllister?”

He jerks, looking at the woman with wide eyes. “Huh?”

“Your insurance information.”

“Oh. Yeah. I have it,” He says, fishing around in his pockets for the card they snatched out of Alex’s wallet. He finds it and hands it to her.

She examines it, comparing the information to her computer monitor. “Alright, everything seems to be in check. We’ll have a triage nurse out momentarily to do some basic check-ups.”

He nods mutely, and they wander in the general direction of the waiting area.

“Hey, are you sure you’re okay?” Natalie asks softly as they sit down.

“Kid, you’ve asked me that five times today. I’m fine.”

“You don’t seem fine,” she says stubbornly.

“I’ll be fine once you stop asking me pointless questions,” he retorts.

She huffs, and slings her blue flu mask over her ears. “I feel ridiculous wearing this.”

_He sees her, collapsed on smooth tile and barely breathing, hand barely touching the blue fabric abandoned on the ground._

His heart skips like a rock over water, stuttering beats sinking low in his stomach.

“You look ridiculous wearing that,” he says, mouth dry. “At least you’re not spreading your germs everywhere, though.”

She shrugs, and they sit in silence for a while.

Eventually, a nurse emerges from the doors. “Natalie McAllister?”

Natalie stands up, and so does he.

The nurse smiles at them. “Come with me.”

They follow her into a small room, machinery lined up like jigsaw pieces on the walls and counter. Natalie sits down on the leather chair in the center of the room. The nurse looks down at the form. “So I see you’ve been here twice already this past year, for…” she scrutinizes her chart, “first a concussion and superficial lacerations, and then severe penetrating abdominal trauma. Jeez, not a very lucky year for you, is it, Ms. McAllister?”

Natalie shrugs nonchalantly. “I dunno,” she says slowly, catching Lucifer’s eye. “…It’s had it’s moments.” She smiles slightly, gaze flicking back to the nurse.

He feels his face turning red, but it’s soon forgotten when Natalie breaks into a round of hacking, wheezing into the fabric of her flu mask.

“Oh my, that doesn’t sound good,” the nurse says, taking out a thermometer. “I’m just going to take your temperature; open wide.”

Natalie complies, and the nurse delicately places the metal spoke under her tongue. After a moment, she takes it out.

“101.3,” she reads with a frown. “How long have you been sick?”

“Like…maybe two weeks?” Natalie supplies, shifting uncomfortably.

“Okay,” she says, lifting up a stethoscope. “I’m going to listen to your breathing now, could you take off your sweatshirt and your mask?”

She places the chestpiece on Natalie’s back.

“I want you to inhale as deeply as you can.”

She listens intently as Natalie breathes, and even Lucifer can tell that what she’s hearing isn’t good. Her face screws up a little with concern.

“Well, Natalie, I’ll need to get you a medical screening with a doctor so they can confirm it, but I think you may have developed pneumonia alongside your flu,” The nurse says, standing up. “We’ll probably take an x ray and maybe some blood tests as well.”

He can’t help but shoot Natalie an  _I-told-you-so_  glance behind the nurse’s back, and she sticks her tongue out at him.

“Come with me,” the nurse says. “You can come too, Mr. McAllister.”

The x rays stretch on forever, and once they’re done they insist on taking some blood tests as well. Natalie sits through it, wincing as they prick at her skin. He finds himself tapping his fingers on his arms in restless beats, a stuttering rhythm that matches the anxious pulse of his heart.

He thinks of Pestilence, sitting eight hours away in a casino, playing her cards like a skilled musician would their instrument. He grits his teeth.

_Is she the one doing this?_

After the medical staff poked and prodded at her sufficiently, they put them in a room to wait. There’s a small cot surrounded by machines, a rickety grey stool propped in the corner. Natalie clambers onto the bed, collapsing in a heap on the stiff padding.

“Tired?” He asks her, claiming his spot on the stool.

“Exhausted,” She says, rubbing at her eyes and yawning.

“That’s understandable,” says the attending physician as he enters the room, examining a clipboard that presumably contained her file on it. “I don’t know why you didn’t come to see us earlier. I’m Dr. Jones, by the way.”

“What’s going on?” Natalie asks from her bed, voice garbled by the phlegm in her throat. She clears it roughly, hands instinctively coming up to rub her throat.

“We’re still waiting on test results, but its becoming more and more apparent that you have an infection in both of your lungs,” He says. “Normally we would say that it can be treated at home, but due to the long duration of your illness and the fact that you’ve also shown many symptoms of influenza, we’re keeping you here on an IV drip.”

Natalie doesn’t say anything, so he steps in.

“Okay, sounds good…I need to get to work,” Lucifer says, “Natalie’s friend… Stan will be coming over for a while.”

Jones nods, gathering his supplies. “Alright, then. Visiting hours end at 8:00. I’m going to push on your arm, Natalie, just stay still and relax.”

Lucifer watches as the doctor disinfects her arm and inserts a catheter. Natalie winces a little at the sting, but her expression clears as the doctor attaches a thin tube and tapes it to her arm. “There we go, you did great.”

Natalie smiles earnestly at him. “Thanks.”

“Okay,” Jones says, dropping the used needle into a container. “I’ll be back shortly with your test results. Feel free to call for a nurse if you need anything.”

As soon as he leaves the room Lucifer shifts back into his normal form, crossing his arms and leaning back against the wall.

“Jesus, that was getting uncomfortable.”

“Yeah, a little,” Natalie says, raising an eyebrow. “You have no clue how to be a dad, dude.”

“I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, then,” he says, taking off Alex’s glasses and shoving them in his pocket. He lets his hands fall to his sides.

Natalie squints at him. “Are you absolutely  _sure—_ ”

“Kid, if you ask me if i’m okay one more time I will not hesitate to kick your ass,” he snaps, clenching his fists. “I’m fine; I’m the  _last thing_  you should be concerned about right now.”

Her face lights up, ignoring the empty threat he threw at her. “Wait. Are you worried about  _me_?”

“Well obviously,” he says irritably, shoving his hands into his pockets.

“I don’t understand why, though,” She says, her grin melting away. “It’s not like being sick is that bad—” She pauses, eyes widening, trying to suppress something locked in her ribcage. She finally gives in, and an involuntary hoard of coughs wrack up her body. She hunches over, chest heaving, hands coming up to claw at her flu mask.

“Okay,” she gasps, ripping it off, “Maybe I should’ve come here a little earlier.”

“No kidding,” he says, clasping his hands together.

She glances at him, eyes watering and snot streaming down her face. She grabs a handful of tissues from the nightstand.

“I really appreciate you doing this for me, Lucifer,” she says, wiping away the evidence of her sickness. Her voice is quieter than usual.

“It’s no problem,” he says, averting his gaze.

“No, really, thank you. For everything.” She hesitates. “…You know I love you, right?”

He freezes at the words, the familiar ring of them chiming through his head, taking him back to a bus station where everything seemed so much more simple, the sunlight streaming through the window panes and her small smile a reverberation of the one she gives him now, sitting in a hospital room.

“…Yeah,” he mumbles, remembering the salty taste of the ocean and the burning fire in her voice when she traded her soul for his freedom. “Yeah, I know.”

* * *

He can tell she’s getting worse.

She tries to stifle the painful spasms that come with the coughs, her voice becoming more gravelly as the hour passes. Eventually their conversation trails off into silence, only broken by the rattling sound of Natalie’s breathing.The fluorescent lighting makes it hard to tell if she’s actually getting paler or if it’s just the light leeching the color out of her face. He stands up, peering at the perspiration accumulating on her temple.

“Natalie, are you okay?”

“So I’m not allowed to ask that but you are? Talk about double-standards,” She jokes weakly, curling in on herself.

“I’m not the one who’s sick,” he says, reaching out to touch her forehead. It’s hot against his palm. “Jesus, you’re burning up.”

The doctor from before–Jones–enters the room. “Well, Natalie—” He stops when he sees Lucifer hovering over her bedside. “Who are you?”

“I’m her friend, Stan,” he says curtly. “I think her fever’s getting worse.”

He frowns. “The IV should be helping with that.”

“Well, it’s not working!” Lucifer says, voice rising. “She’s not getting better!”

Natalie pushes on his arm a little, frowning at him. “Stop being a butthead, Stan; I’m fine.”

Jones looks at her, hand reaching to open a drawer and pulling out a thermometer. He holds it out to her. “He might be right; I’m going to check again.”

He waits for a few moments, and looks at the temperature. “103.2,” he says. “We’ll have you take some Tylenol and hopefully it’ll break.”

Natalie deflates, sinking back against the bed. “Okay.”

The doctor pauses, and Lucifer holds his breath. He’s seen enough of humanity to know when they have something grim to say, locked behind their teeth like a morbid treasure.

“Also…” He says reluctantly, true to form, “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your tests came back. You definitely have pneumonia in both of your lungs, as well as hypoxemia.”

“What’s that?” Natalie asks, looking up at him with confusion. Jones smiles at her, and Lucifer bristles at the subtle look of pity in the curl of his lips, the bend of his forehead.

“You don’t have enough oxygen in your bloodstream,” he says. “We’re going to need to put a mask on you so your levels don’t drop any lower.”

“…Oh,” she says timidly, clenching the thin sheets she’s resting on. Lucifer sees the slight glimmer of fear in her eyes. “Okay, then.”

A nurse comes in after the doctor leaves, sending Natalie a reassuring smile as she replaces the blue mask over her lips with a clear plastic one, attached to more tubes. “You’re doing great, honey,” she says soothingly. She looks at Lucifer. “Just so you know, visiting time ends in an hour.”

He gives her a short nod, and she leaves.

“This sucks,” Natalie says, voice smothered by her mask.

“I can imagine.”

“I’m so tired…”

“It’s been a long day,” Lucifer agrees. “Get some rest.”

She peers at him, examining his features. She doesn’t say it, but he can tell the question on her lips anyways.

_Are you sure you’re okay?_

He bites his cheek and leaves her silent query unanswered.

She eventually migrates her gaze to the ceiling and closes her eyes uneasily, her ragged breathing evening out into something less tangible.

He relaxes slightly in his stool, absently looking out the door into the hall. It’s stiflingly quiet, save for Natalie’s breathing, deadened with sleep and the oxygen mask obscuring her face. His eyes flicker to her face, her eyelids fluttering slightly, mouth slightly open.

Images jolt into him like a lightning strike, burning into his retinas.

_Kid, get up._

_She doesn’t answer, still and unmoving on the hospital floor._

He tries to shake the memories away like stray water droplets, but they seep into him and find a home there, venom leaking into his veins.

_Natalie._

His fingers dig into his jeans. What the hell is happening?

The past three days have been reflections of each other, curving and twisting back to the time where he opened his eyes at 8:24 to Natalie’s sunlit room. He glances at the clock on the wall. 7:37 PM.

Natalie coughs in her sleep, and he jerks to look at her, automatically rising to his feet. It’s not a coincidence that the minutes and hours bent back on on the day she’s supposed to…

_I’m so sorry, but there’s nothing we can do._

(Her breathing is uneven, and it sounds more like drowning than swallowing air.)

_She’s not going to wake up._

(She shifts, and he can see the beads of sweat on her fevered cheeks, the red blotchy against her greying skin.)

The realization hits him like a bullet. It’s all centered on her.

She’s going to die, and the day will echo itself again, and she’ll keep dying until he finds a way to save her and  _he needs to save her._

He looks around, the world seeming to turn on its axis.

_Why do you care so much? It’s not like I’m dying or anything!_

He sees the crimson call button by her cot and he slams down on it, pressing until he feels the plastic start to crack under his fingers. His hands are trembling, and paranoia is crawling in his rib cage, tugging on bone and flesh, spreading through his chest like infection.

Natalie opens her eyes blearily at the sound. “What’s going…”

“You’re getting worse,” he says, starting to pace, words tumbling out of his mouth like falling stars. “Why are you getting worse? Aren’t they supposed to be helping? It didn’t happen so fast the last time.” He pauses. “Or maybe I was too stupid to see how bad you were in the first place.”

“What didn’t happen so fast…?” Natalie says, her voice hazy through her mask. “Dude, what are you talking about?”

“I thought that if you got to a hospital sooner it wouldn’t turn out his way,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “But you’re still getting worse. It’s all going to end up the same.”

Natalie pulls herself into a sitting position on her cot. “Hey, you’re freaking out. What’s happening?”

“I don’t even know how to fix this—how do I fix something like this?” he says, leaning his palm on the counter. “I’m so sorry. I’m—”

“Is everything alright?” a nurse says from the doorway.

Natalie turns to her, pulling off her oxygen mask. “My friend—he’s—” she gasps, and her spine curves like the end of a fiddlehead as she coughs up phlegm and a sickening yellow fluid, spattered with red. Her hands are vices around her bed rails as her diaphragm convulses.

The nurse rushes over to her, speaking in a low, soothing voice as she calms Natalie down, bringing her tissues and gently guiding the mask back up to her lips. Lucifer stands in the corner, frozen.

“I’m going to see what else we can do for you, Ms. McAllister,” she promises, and turns to him. “It’s time to go; visiting hours are over.”

“You don’t understand. I need to stay with her,” he says numbly. “I can’t leave her.”

The nurse shakes her head.

“Sir, I’m sorry, but if you’re not a patient, you’re going to have to leave,” she says, voice sympathetic but firm.

Natalie coughs into her oxygen mask, staring at them with half-lidded eyes.

Blood rushes in Lucifer’s ears. “…Okay,” he says simply, his voice surprisingly calm amidst his torrential thoughts. His hand comes up to grip his arm.

The nurse relaxes, visibly relieved. “Alright, I’ll escort you ou—”

Lucifer squeezes, and he barely registers the pain as a sharp, splintering sound cuts through the room. The blood drains from the nurse’s face, and he can hear Natalie’s muffled gasp.

“Okay,” he says again, cooly inspecting his bruising, broken arm. “I’m a patient now. Guess I have to stay.”

* * *

He does, but not in the way he’s expecting.

“This is bullshit,” he mutters to himself for what seems like the thousandth time, pulling at his restraints. His cast-clad arm itches, and when he reaches to tear away the plaster the padded cuff on his wrist stops him short. He glances at it in annoyance before ripping it off of the cot they’ve confined him to.

Looking back, he shouldn’t have been surprised when the nurse called security, and after putting a cast on his broken arm, they took him directly to the psych ward for reasons they didn’t bother to explain in detail. Something along the lines of being “a danger to himself and society.”

 _Ridiculous_. He’s been a danger to society for the past few millennia and they’ve never locked him up for it before now.

It’s been hours since he’s seen her, and his heart beats faster with every tick of the fucking clock mounted on the wall of his locked room. It’s enough to drive anybody crazy. The hands taunt him as they circle closer to five in the morning.

He uses his free hand to rip his cast off, the plaster breaking apart as he pulls. He tugs his arm free and fumbles with his leg restraints, clumsily trying to undo them before giving up and tearing them off, too.

He stands, stretching his stiff limbs. He eyes the steel door, curling his hands into fists. He doesn’t necessarily  _want_  to do this but it’s not his first time breaking down a building to get to her.

It turns out he doesn’t need to, because in that moment the door swings open and an orderly walks in. “Alright, sir, I’m just here to check up on yo–”

He doesn’t get to finish the rest of his sentence before Lucifer hits him cleanly on the neck, letting him drop to the ground with a loud thud.

“It’s nothing personal,” he mutters as he steps over the man’s unconscious form. “I just don’t appreciate being locked up.”

He strides out the door, letting his features shift, the clothes on his back melting away into plain blue scrubs. He walks down the hallway, past more steel doors and other nurses meandering about, desperately hoping that no one would stop him. There’s an elevator at the end of the hall.

There’s only a down button, and he presses it, biting his cheek. He stumbles inside when the doors slide open.

“Where are you, Natalie?” He murmurs, looking at the floor buttons. There are five of them, with him being on the top level. He pushes the third one.

The time it takes for the elevator to descend feels like millennia, and as soon as the doors open, he rushes out, noting with relief that this looks familiar, barely restraining himself enough to walk to where her room is. There’s a pit in his stomach, a sluggish feeling of unease that grows the closer he walks. It’s 5:00 AM.

(For a moment, everything is quiet.)

As he edges in on her room, a steady beep cuts through the silence, a tone that he’s heard before but never in reality, and other people are running to where she is, shouting and reaching for machines and shock paddles.

“Code!”

Something fractures inside of him, and he’s running too because this can’t be happening again. He pushes into her already full room, and he doesn’t want to look but he can’t stop looking as they press onto her chest and shoot her full of adrenaline and other drugs. She lays limply on the cot, jerking as they pump electricity into her body.

_No. No. This can’t be happening again._

They try.

They try.

The clock ticks, ticks, ticks, and he can barely breathe as they crack her ribs to beat her heart for her, sending currents through her body and shaking their heads as they fail, time and time again.

“I’m calling it,” someone says, an hour later. “Does anyone want to try something else?”

There’s just exhausted silence in response. Lucifer can feel his knees starting to shake.

“I don’t know how she deteriorated so quickly,” a nurse says, distress evident in his tone. “She was talking and smiling just a few hours ago.”

“It happens sometimes,” the doctor says softly. He catches Lucifer’s eye, hands braced against the wall to keep himself steady. He walks up to him.

“She your first code?” He says, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I can’t say it’ll get easier. It’s always rough when they’re young.”

Lucifer shakes his head, a thump in his throat. “I need to go,” he whispers, backing out the door, away from the doctor, away from the straggling medical staff,  _away from her body._

He starts to run.

* * *

There’s a senselessness in his escape; he blindly stumbles out of the building, the cool night pressing on his skin. He feels himself grow in height, the scrubs disintegrating into air, horns ripping out of his forehead, and he can see the violet light they’re casting on the road.

His feet catch on the concrete but he loses his thoughts in the feeling of his bones pounding onto the road, pushing him further away from reality.

(Distantly, he thinks that he would be consumed by the voices by now, if not for her.)

(Distantly, he thinks that maybe letting Hell take over would’ve been easier than this.)

The ground below him eventually shifts from asphalt to grass, and he lets his knees buckle, collapsing onto the earth, a breath rattling its way out of him.

He looks up. The sun is starting to rise, the sky dyed deep crimson by the slowly emerging light. A bird starts to chirp. 

He vaguely feels his body convulsing, and after a little bit he realizes he’s crying, his ribs expanding almost painfully and air rushing out of his lungs in unsteady, choking sobs. He lets himself crumble, his shoulders shaking with grief.

He stays there for a while.

He doesn’t know when the daylight happens or when his tears stop, because one moment he’s kneeling in the grass and then he sees a dark silhouette cut against the sky and then—

His stomach twists, time bends.

_He opens his eyes._

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Natalie says, looking up from her chemistry textbook, “You were out longer than I was.”


	3. part three

_“You hold an absence_  
_at your center,_  
_as if it were a life.”_

> _–Richard Brostoff, “Grief”_

* * *

When he was younger, time didn’t matter.

Years and months and days would sweep by like gusts of wind, and he would laugh in the face of it as it withered others away into the ether. Centuries and millennia were barely a wink when compared to the infinitely long stretch of immortality. It was nothing; he was created to withstand it, and soon, he stopped caring enough to keep track of it.

So once, he was untouched by time. But he’s lived through this day seven times over now. Seven times he’s tried to save her, and seven that he watched her life fade away like smoke into air.

It pummels him into the dust.

“…Lucifer?”

Her voice is unbearably soft. He looks at her confused, worried face, green eyes staring intently at him. He has to fight the urge to avert his gaze.

“Yeah?”

“I asked you if you were feeling alright.” She pauses, kneeling down beside him. The strands of morning sunlight set her hair alight as she moves. “Angels don’t get sick, right?”

“No,” he says, giving in and glancing down at the carpet. He picks out the individual threads of fabric and commits them to memory. “No, we don’t get sick.”

“Then what’s upsetting you?” She hedges.

“Who says I’m upset?” He says reflexively, his eyes still dragging on the ground.

Natalie makes a noise of disbelief. “Dude, I thought you were a better actor than that. And even if you didn’t deflect that question so badly, I’d still know that there’s something wrong.”

He stares at her blankly until she taps her forehead. “Horns?”

Right. The horns.

“What about them?” He asks.

“Well,” Natalie says, “they’re bright purple and glowing, and they’ve never done that before…”

“Oh, that,” Lucifer says, forcing a flippant tone. “I decided it was time for a change in appearance.”

She purses her lips, unimpressed. “I know you’re lying.”

He just shrugs, picking himself off of his beanbag chair.

“You still haven’t answered me,” Natalie says stubbornly, folding her arms. Her attempt at a defiant image is spoiled by a bout of coughing, her stiff form collapsing in on itself as she tries to clear her throat. There’s something in his bones that ache as he hands her the box of tissues sitting on her bed.

She takes it, clutching it like a lifeline as her shoulders shake.

“Is it… does  _this_  have something to do with it?” Natalie asks breathlessly, blowing her nose. She slowly straightens up. “Does it have something to do with me being sick?”

Lucifer stiffens. She seems to take that as an affirmative, shifting closer to him. Her tired eyes meet his.

“You’re worried about me?” She asks, hands clasping together. Her voice is uncharacteristically quiet.

There’s no use lying now. He nods mutely.

The slopes of her shoulders go slack, her mouth popping open with a muted sort of wonder. She hesitates and then, to his surprise, moves in to hug him, tentatively snaking her arms around his waist. He freezes for a moment, but his hands slowly come up to hover over her back, unsure and shaking.

“You don’t need to worry about me,” she mumbles against his chest. Her skin is feverish against his, almost burning. “I’m fine, I promise.” She breaks away and gives him an earth-shattering smile, tucking a few strands of hair behind her ear.

His arms fall to his sides, dangling limply. What can he even say to that?

_You’re going to break that promise soon._

_I tried to save you. I really did._

_I’m so sorry._

“…I’ve been thinking,” he says instead, “maybe it’s better if I go to the coast alone. You can stay here and rest.”

She looks insulted, drawing away from him. “I just told you I was fine!”

“Natalie,” he says, putting emphasis on the word, and her eyes widen a little bit. “I need you to trust me. Stay here, or hell, even better,  _go to a doctor._  Just…I need to do this alone.”

She stares at him like she’s trying to solve a complicated puzzle, trying to get all the pieces to fit right in her head. She bites her lip. “…okay. I’ll stay.”

It just might be a death sentence, but he can’t watch her go again. Not when he could be doing something about it. He has a deal to strike.

* * *

Pestilence isn’t at the casino.

He stands in the middle of the place, dumbfounded. The scent of old cigarettes and strong cologne is starting to settle into his skin, his clothes. He looks around wildly, trying to pick out the white dress and the bleached hair and the sharply manicured nails, but she’s nowhere to be seen amongst the gamblers milling about.

“Fuck,” he whispers hoarsely, letting his fingers drag through his hair. It’s nearly seven thirty; she should’ve been here by now.

He strides over to the seat she would have been sitting at, now occupied by an older man. He grabs the man by the shoulder and turns him around, staring intently at the man’s startled eyes.

“Have you seen a woman here recently?” He asks sharply. “She’s black, blond hair, well put-together, kind of a germaphobe? She goes by…Keens. Lola Keens.”

The man grunts, seeming to recollect himself. “Yeah, but not today, thank God. She’s been in and out for the past few weeks. Wins big every goddamn time she plays.”

 _Fuck_.

“Do you know where she is now?” He asks desperately, shaking the man a little bit. He shoves Lucifer away.

“Jesus, buddy, calm down. No, she never said anything about where she was staying. Just wait a few days and she’ll be back.”

“Not helpful,” Lucifer mutters, letting go of him and turning away. “I don’t have that kind of time.”

“You’re welcome, you asshole!” He hears the man yell after him, but he ignores the grating voice and pushes through the doors of the casino. The sun is simmering on the horizon, stars puncturing the darkening sky.

He opens up the burner cell he had bought before leaving and dials.

“Hello?” Natalie’s voice says. He can’t tell if she sounds worse or if it’s just the crackling reception warping her tone. She coughs sharply on the other end of the line, and he winces. Definitely worse. It sounds like her throat is a sheet of sandpaper, her breath raw and pained as she chokes it out of her lungs.

“Hey, kid,” he says, starting to pace. “How’re you feeling?”

“I’m okay,” she says hoarsely, and then, more distantly: “It’s just Stan, Dad.”

“Remind me to never let you gamble. You’re a horrible liar,” he mutters to her.

He hears her exhale. “Fine. I laid in bed until Dad came to check on me and he took me to the doctor.” She pauses. “Turns out I have pneumonia along with the flu and it's…getting bad. Really fast.”

He can hear the fear in her voice, matching the swells of anxiety curling in his chest.

“Just—Just sit tight, kid,” he says, staring at the hazy skyline, orange fading into a deep lavender in the west. “I’ll try to be back later tonight.”

“I don’t think I’m going anywhere. They want to keep me here overnight on an IV drip.”

“Figures,” he says quietly, caging his tone into something calmer, more tame than the thunderstorm of panic that’s striking into his rib cage.

(That’s what they always do before it gets bad.)

“You know,” she says. “I’m really grateful that you’re doing all of this for me, Lucifer.”

He freezes at his name. “Uh. Isn’t your dad right there?”

“He went to the bathroom; I’m going to make this quick,” she says, voice cracking a little from overuse. She clears her throat. “I don’t know why you decided to stick around and take care of me—”

_She has to know. Surely she has to know by now._

“—but I just wanted to say—”

_Don’t._

“—I love you.”

There’s static between her voice and the phone speaker, playing that soft noise into his ear. He stays silent, still looking at the darkening sky.

Natalie laughs nervously on the other end of the line.

“I’m sorry, I’m just sorta freaked out by everything that’s happening. But I do, I promise. I just want you to know that.”

“I know,” he says, swallowing all the things he wants to say, threatening to crawl out of his throat like something alive. He lets those words sit inside his stomach and start to rot there. “I know. I’ll be back soon.”

He hangs up. The last vestiges of the sunlight are creeping along the eastern horizon, a flicker goodbye before they surrender to the night.

* * *

He searches.

Time is working against him, the sky’s polluted umber curling into a hazy blue and then darkening to pitch. The streetlights glow dull orange, flicking on and off.

She isn’t in town; he’s looked everywhere, in every building, and still, he doesn’t catch a glimpse of her shock of blond hair or the swish of a white dress. He wanders down an alleyway, letting the shadows swallow him.

“Where the  _fuck_  are you?” He says to no one in particular, slamming a hand into the wall. He comes out the opposite end of it, striding to a dumpy building along the street, the one with the room he had rented out the previous day for the sake of playing against her.

It’s nearly three in the morning, but he takes out his phone and dials her number again as he opens the door. He feels his heart quicken a little, the palms of his hands starting to warm with fear. She’s most likely asleep, her breath becoming shallower and shallower until it sputters out like a dying engine. He opens the door to the room, staring at the grimy walls and flimsy table without seeing them, the phone ringing in his ear.

“Hello? Stanley?” Alex McAllister’s voice says on the other side of the line, exhaustion apparent even through the phone.

Lucifer hangs up, his hands starting to tremble. Too late.

It washes over him, the now-familiar feeling of grief that makes his hands tremble, an unwelcome, prickling heat that somehow radiates through his body like ice. Paradoxical, but he still feels this strange inversion of temperature fighting against each other until a perfect numbness creeps along his skin. He leans against the wall, fabric sliding against plaster and dirt until he hits the ground.

Sinking into the depths of unfeelingness is easier than the barely contained swells of panic clawing at his skin, pooling into his cells and taking him apart atom by atom.

(It’s no use. He’s always too late.)

He stares at the wall for hours, hands curled around his knees.

* * *

It’s morning when the door opens, streams of milky light turning the dull brown hue of the room into shades of grey. He jolts, looking at the figure in the door with wide eyes. He didn’t expect that she would even attempt to find him, sunken here in this shell of a room. He braces a hand against the wall and slowly stands up, his joints cracking as he unfolds his legs.

“I’ve never seen you this worked up before without turning into a hellish rage monster,” Pestilence remarks from the light of the entryway, having the audacity to sound amused. “You’re not so intimidating when all you can do is make your earrings glow.”

Anger has an incredible capacity to leech the numbness away.

A vicious part of him is satisfied to see her recoil when he approaches her, fury in his eyes and hell running through his veins. He’s almost willing to let the voices in, let them take over his body and ruin the world in the few moments it has left before time resets itself.

Almost.

“What the fuck is happening to me?” He demands instead, slamming his fist onto the table. It cracks and folds in on itself from the force, wood splintering, scattering on the grimy floor. Pestilence jerks back momentarily, but regains her composure, eyes lingering on the blood streaming down his knuckles.

“Someone’s playing a  _very_  nasty game with you. And to be completely frank, I think they’re winning,” she says, closing the door behind her.

“Quit dancing around my questions,” he snarls. “I want the details, Conquest.”

She looks at her watch. “It’s a quarter past eight. You don’t have very much time left, Lucifer.”

“I don’t care,” he says, reaching out to grab her. She steps back, her narrowed eyes trained on his bloody hands. “Why is time repeating itself?  _Why is this happening to me?_ ”

She shakes her head. “Nothing you do is going to stop this, Lucifer. There’s no point. Your pretty little friend is just going to keep dying, and you’re going to have to deal with it. If I were you, I would just kill myself and end it already.”

The anger melts into something sharper, a biting sensation at his ribcage and the corners of his eyes. “I can’t,” He says, and he sounds more lost than he can ever remember being.

“You’re just being difficult; you know you can’t win this.”

He swallows. “I can’t leave her.”

“Look where you are now, Lucifer,” she says, gesturing around the room, miles and miles from the hospital where she was probably lying, perfectly still and unbreathing. “You already did.”

Her words are more poisonous than the blood that runs through his veins, and he feels himself deflate. He had let her down so many times, and this was inarguably the screw-up to top them all.

He thought watching her die was bad.

Leaving her to do it alone proved to be infinitely worse.

“Think about your options,” Pestilence says, idly inspecting her electric green nails. “I’d say the best is to choke down some angel blood and say sayonara to this shitshow of a world. It might even save you a bit of pain before the end comes.”

She opens the door again. “And at least you’ll save your friend the pain of dying again.”

He feels a little bit of hope wither inside his chest as she leaves.

The clock strikes 8:24.

* * *

On the morning of April third, spring had slowly settled into the earth, heat radiating off the sidewalks, flowers in the neighbor’s garden beginning to bloom. The sun touches the ground unhindered, the atmosphere free of clouds and the filmy haze of pollution only touching the cusp where air met horizon.

It seems like a sick cosmic joke for it to be so beautiful on what’s inarguably been the worst day of his existence.

“Michael!” He demands to the sky, curling his fingers until they cut into the skin of his palms. He’s standing in the middle of a playground, at the park right by her house.

He wonders if his brother can even hear him, or if he’s just yelling at the sprawl of cloudless blue like an idiot. It’s probably the latter. He and Michael are not by any means experts of communication; they exist like gears out of time, knocking against each other painfully until something gives way.

Even so, maybe they’re on the same page this day, because he feels his brother’s presence melting into the vicinity. The relief he feels in conjunction to Michael’s arrival is foreign, almost unpleasant in just how out of place the sensation is.

Behind him, Michael speaks.

“Why did you call me here?” His voice is cold. Lucifer turns around to see his brother scrutinizing him, arms folded.

“Michael,” he says, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “I need your help.”

Michael’s expression briefly flickers into one of incredulity before it turns to stone. “I don’t owe you anything, Lucifer. Especially not these days.” He turns around to leave.

Lucifer grabs his shoulder, pulling him back.

“It’s Natalie,” he says, and Michael freezes.

“What?”

“She’s sick.” Lucifer swallows. “Really sick.”

Michael looks like he’s swallowed something rotten, the cloying taste sticking on his tongue. His eyes flick to the violet energy crackling out of his gauges and something seems to dawn on him. “Is she…”

“Yeah,” Lucifer says bleakly. “I think she ran into Pestilence directly a few weeks ago, when we went to the coast.”

“It’s Pestilence’s work?” Michael asks slowly, brows furrowed.

Lucifer resists the urge to slap him, crossing his arms tightly against his chest. “Yes, I just told you that,” he says impatiently. “And I need you to heal her because Pestilence isn’t having it.”

Michael opens his mouth to say something, and closes it almost tentatively, pressing his lips together.

“…I can’t,” he admits after a beat.

Lucifer stares at him blankly before the words hit him, two bullets that pierced his skin and lodge their way somewhere deep in his chest.

“Why the everloving fuck not?” he demands, not even trying to hide the hysteria in his tone. “I thought you liked her!”

To his credit, Michael looks distressed, beads of sweat forming on his forehead and hands snaking around one another anxiously. “It has nothing to do with how much I like her; Natalie’s been infected with a biblical plague, Lucifer! Heaven can’t just interfere with that!”

“Oh, so you’re willing to fuck her life up but not willing to save it? Yeah, that’s definitely fair to her,” Lucifer says bitterly, folding his arms.

Michael’s expression contorts, the color draining from his face.

“I offered her an  _out_!” he yells, suddenly furious, taking a step forward. “I offered to forcibly break your contract, and I wanted to tear my hair out each time she refused because I  _knew_. I knew she would die if she stuck around you too long. I wasn’t the one who fucked up her life, Lucifer. That was all you, and  _you’re_  the one who’s going to have to deal her rotting in hell for the rest of eternity—”

Lucifer shoves him away, more out of instinct than anger. The icy feeling sinking into his stomach goes beyond fury, or grief.

_Don’t tell me you feel guilt? Haha, you can’t do that, right?_

Michael stumbles back, his expression still bitter. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help her, as much as I want to. I couldn’t even if I tried.”

Lucifer bites down the angry shout that wants to escape his throat, tasting blood on his tongue. “Why not?”

Michael looks at the ground. “The only way to stop Pestilence’s work is to appeal directly to her. Angels can’t do anything against her.”

“I’ve tried that,” Lucifer says desperately. “I’ve tried so many things, and it’s not working, Michael. There has to be another way.”

Michael hesitates. “Well…”

“Well what?”

“There  _is_  someone who may be able to help.”

Lucifer steps toward him. “Who is it?”

“Dad.”

He stiffens; his hands automatically curling into fists. “You know he doesn’t want to talk to me.”

“That’s because you never try,” Michael replies.

“Because I’m the  _devil_. The undoer of Eden, the adversary of Heaven. He won’t talk to me.”

“You’re also His son,” Michael points out, “and He loves you. That’s kinda His thing.”

“ _Michael_.”

“ _Lucifer_ ,” he mimicks. “Where’s Natalie right now?”

“She’s resting,” he says. He had told her to stay and wait, and that he’d fix everything by the time the day reached its peak.  _Liar_.

Michael scrutinizes him, eyes narrowing. “Just…think about it, okay?”

“That can’t be the only way—”

“I’m sorry, I need to go,” Michael interrupts him, grimacing. “There have been some disturbances in time lately and we’re trying to figure out what’s going on. I really wish I could help you.” He turns away.

“Wait—Time?” Lucifer asks, registering his brother’s words. “Wait—Michael—”

But he’s already gone, carried away by the spring breeze and a flutter of wings.

* * *

“Hey,” He says as he clambers through her bedroom window.

She looks up from her chemistry textbook, sniffling a little. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

“Michael can’t help,” he says. “He’s always been a stickler for the rules.”

“Okay,” she says, standing up. “Does that mean we should get bus tickets?”

He shakes his head. “I think…I think maybe I should just try and heal you.”

Natalie tilts her head. “Won’t that be hard? We’re not contracted anymore.”

He shrugs, ignoring the prickle of apprehension under his skin. “It shouldn’t be too bad. At least it wouldn’t hurt to try.” He stretches his arm toward her.

She steps toward him. “So we’ll just…hang out here?”

“Yeah. Do whatever you want, just keep close to me,” he says, placing a hand on her back and closing his eyes. It’s harder, now that their souls aren’t linked by contract, but he can feel her sickness now, an ugly thing that crawls through her veins, nesting in there. His brand of healing isn’t tied to heaven anymore and isn’t foolproof by any means, but he hopes that it’s enough.

(It feels dangerous to hope.)

He feels his energy seeping into her skin, curling up in the empty spaces between her life and the thing taking it. It doesn’t swallow her sickness so much as press against it, driving it the the furthest corners of her being until it melts into the atmosphere.

Natalie sighs. He feels her shoulders slacken against his palm.

“You know that feeling,” she says, her voice already less ragged, “when you forget how much you love being healthy until you’re sick?”

“I don’t,” he answers easily. “I’ve never been sick.”

“It’s like…” Natalie pauses, trying to find the words. “Well, it’s like that old cliché. ‘You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.’ I’m so happy to have a working nose again.”

“You’re welcome,” he says, allowing himself to be a little smug. The pallor of her skin already has a healthier tint to it as she turns to face him.

“I was just about to thank you!” She says mock-defensively. There’s a smile creeping on her lips, threatening to bare its teeth. He shifts his hand to rest on her shoulder, the incandescent light of his energy still flowing steadily into her. Her gaze moves down to it, and her expression softens. “But seriously…Thank you, Lucifer.”

Something twists in his gut, but he’s gotten exceptionally good at ignoring these little flickers of emotion over the past few months.

“Don’t sweat it,” he says casually, shrugging a little. “Like I said before, you did me a big favor back at the warehouse.”

Natalie’s smile fades, just a little.

“…Is that really the only reason why you’re doing all of this?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Is it just because I used my contract on you?” Natalie says. “That you’re taking care of me now?”

He freezes, glancing over her crestfallen expression, like one of her worst fears had just been confirmed. Did she really think–

“No,” he says hastily. “I mean,  _partially_ , because this is what got you into this mess in the first place, but I promise it’s not that I feel like I owe you or anything. I’m sticking around because I want to.”

She grins. “So… you love me?”

He should have seen it coming, honestly, but he stiffens at the words. His mouth falls open, jaw going slack.

“I—”

“‘Cause I love you,” she says, not waiting for him to respond. She places a hand on his, her fingers curling around the width of his palm on her shoulder. Her voice carries the same tone she used when she said it before and before and before and before. Like it was an invariant law of the universe, something she could search up in the index of her textbook and hold it out to him with a teasing " _look, see?"_

_An object in motion will remain in motion. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Natalie McAllister loves the devil._

He swallows as she continues talking.

“I never know exactly what you’re thinking, but I can tell something’s going on, and I can tell that you’re worried about it.” She scoots closer to him. “I just want you to know that I appreciate everything you’re doing for me.”

He manages to find his voice. “Thank you,” he says, slowly. These aren’t quite the syllables that want to roll off his tongue and into the space between them, but it’s close enough, for now.

She just smiles like she understands the words beneath the words, and reaches for her laptop. “I need to do homework.” She pauses, glancing at her chemistry textbook, discarded to the side of her bed. “I honestly don’t know if I’m going to be able to graduate if I miss any more school.”

Lucifer shrugs. “I don’t see why you’re so concerned. It’s not that important in the grand scheme of things. There are better things to be worried about.”

Natalie scoffs, effectively brushing off any tension in the room. “Excuse  _you_ , but not all of us can be the literal devil for a living. I need to go to college and find a job. And to do that I need to finish this chem homework.”

She keeps a hand on his as she stands up, and he rises with her. It’s a quasi-balancing act as they stumble over to her bed, Natalie tripping over his feet and ducking under his arms. Lucifer presses his palm into her still, a ceaseless current of energy flowing into her body. He’s starting to feel a bit nauseous, like the times she had dragged him to hallowed ground and sang hymns in her nicest voice. He ignores the feeling and rearranges himself around her as they sit down, leaning into the headboard as she leans into his chest, laptop propped up on her knees.

“Okay, so you can help me with chemistry, but I don’t want you anywhere  _near_ my English essay; you can’t spell to save your life,” she says teasingly, flipping open her textbook.

“It’s not my fault that English is fucking stupid,” Lucifer complains, shifting his hand to her arm. “Why do you even need K or S when C can make both sounds?”

He can’t see her face but he can tell that Natalie is rolling her eyes, the slight vibrations against his ribs betraying her soft laughing.

They sit in a comfortable and relative silence for a while, the soft clicks of her typing and her gentle humming the only sounds filling the room. He can sense the malady still lurking beneath her skin, refusing to be completely stifled by his energy. He presses it further down, but the sickness seems stubbornly asymptotic, getting smaller but never quite leaving her.

Natalie is mostly unaware of the quiet battle he’s waging, only sometimes glancing at his hands pressed against her, filled with light, and then looking back to her homework. He’s surprised she’s not bored of the monotony of studying. That she seems perfectly content to just stay here.

His hands start to tremble.

He doesn’t like to say, but he has limits.

He feels himself getting weaker, a foreign sense of physical exhaustion that causes his eyes to flutter, seeing double. He breathes, trying to let the air filling his lungs wake him up.

Natalie peeks back at him. “Did you just yawn?” Her eyes widen as she scans his face. “Dude, are you okay?”

“What do you mean?” He asks, and is surprised when his words come out messily, the vowels failing to come off his tongue.

Natalie looks increasingly alarmed, her gaze dropping to his hands, still resting on her, softly glowing as they heal her. “Stop doing that.”

“No,” he says.

“Yes,” She insists, grabbing them and ripping them off. He holds onto her fingers because she  _needs_  this; she can’t die again, not when he could be doing something to stop it.

“It’s not gone,” he mumbles. The sensation of drowsiness is new to him, but he decides that he hates it. He needs to stay awake. He needs to keep her alive.

“I feel great,” Natalie argues, shucking off his touch. She tugs at her duvet until it becomes untucked from the corners of her bed. “Here, we’ll both take a nap, get some rest. Then you can keep doing your healing thingy.”

She sets her laptop and book down on the floor, and glances at him disapprovingly. “You need to start taking care of yourself better.”

“Hypocrite,” Lucifer says as she sits back down, pulling the covers up to her knees. “I could say the same thing to you.”

“Lay down,” she says. “I’ll sleep too.”

She rests her head on her pillow, looking expectantly at him. Lucifer reluctantly lays down beside her, almost nose-to-nose. She looks at him intently.

“Are you going to close your eyes?” She whispers.

“Are you?” He replies.  
  
“I will if you do it,” She says.

“Okay,” he says.

So he lets them shut, and he silently places a hand on his own arm, fingernails digging into his skin. The pain of it is more like an itch, but it’s enough to keep him awake until her breathing slowly evens out.

He opens his eyes, black dots hovering around his vision.

Natalie lays facing him, sound asleep. Her eyes flutter as she dreams, breath whistling out of her mouth in a soft snore. He gently reaches out to touch her shoulder, and calls upon the last few dregs of his energy to pour into her.

It’s hard. His arm feels heavier than the earth, the weight of gravity ceaselessly pressing on it. Sweat forms on his temple. For a moment, he wishes that he’s still an angel, if only to be able to make her better again.

_Tired…_

Then again, if he was still an angel, none of this would’ve happened in the first place. She may not have even been born.

He tries imagine a life without her there. He’s had thousands of years of practice, but these eight months have felt like millions, so many moments compressed into seconds and hours and unquantifiable stretches of time that he can easily split into infinity. He can’t do it; she’s like a garden that’s taken root in his soul, refusing to let go.

At this point, he doesn’t even want her to let go.

_So tired…_

He closes his eyes, just for a second.

When he opens them, it’s dark outside, the window opened to let in the cool breeze. He can feel Natalie shuddering next to him.

Dread crawls into his chest cavity like a parasite.

“Lucifer?” She whispers thickly, skin searing against his. “I don’t feel too good.”

* * *

He doesn’t move when he wakes up. He chooses to listen to her soft exhales instead of his grief, and it’s astounding how much another person’s lungs could make it so much easier for him to breathe.

“Natalie,” he says after a moment, opening his eyes. She jumps a little at his voice, looking up from her chemistry book in surprise.

“Oh, good morning. You scared me,” she says with a sheepish smile, and its the slightest bit of relief to move away from her usual greeting.

“I need to tell you something,” he says.

_You can’t win this._

She moves her textbook to the side of her bed. “Sure, what is it?”

_You’re the one who’s going to have to deal her rotting in hell for the rest of eternity…_

He forces himself to look her in the eye, amber to green.

_If I were you, I would just kill myself and end it already._

“If you could do anything today, just for kicks, what would you do?” He asks her.

She’s caught off guard; her head tilts in confusion, lip jutting out. It’s such a Natalie expression, her whole body reacts to the shifts in her mood, the slightest change in the inflection of her voice. He feels something swell painfully in his chest.

“Why?” She says suspiciously, narrowing her eyes at him. “I thought we were gonna go find out what got me sick.”

Lucifer waves the thought away. “It can wait. You know, I’m starting to think that you might just have the flu after all. I was just being paranoid.”

He can see her trying to find the lie, hidden in the creases of his words, a flash of his eyes. He keeps his gaze steady.

She’s too trusting of him; she sighs, relaxing the set of her shoulders. “Okay, that’s a relief. I was actually getting really worried about it.”

“…Yeah,” He says quietly. “No need to worry.” He clears his throat, standing up a little straighter. “Let’s do something; I’ve been cooped up in this room for days.”

Natalie brightens up. “Sure! Where do you wanna go?”

“It’s your choice, kid.” He hesitates. “Just this once.”

Natalie’s silent, clearly thinking. He can see the pieces fall into place in her head, a jigsaw that he can solve with his eyes closed. He knows what she’s going to say.

“Would you get mad if I said I wanted to go to the coast again?” She asks tentatively, hopefully.

He doesn’t reply. The sighs of the waves seem to be a permanent fixture in his mind, the small coastal town they visited before a now recurring setting in this nightmarish reality.

But he can’t refuse her. Not now.

So he takes her there.

* * *

The ocean steals her fever away; he can feel her skin grow colder with every gust of the salted wind. She sniffs, scooting closer to him, and leans her cheek on his shoulder.

“It’s even more beautiful than I remembered,” she whispers, almost softer than the sea breeze.

He glances at the ocean, the strips of plastic being washed onto the littered shore and the haze of pollution stuck to the horizon. He barks out a humorless laugh.

“What is it?” She asks, shivering against him.

“I can’t figure out how you only see the good in a world that’s done nothing but screw you over,” he says bitterly, pulling his gaze to where the sky bled out in the sea.

“It isn’t so bad,” Natalie says, leaning into him. “I have you.”

He scoffs at her. “Girl, your life has gotten exponentially worse since you met me.”

“You’re wrong,” She says, sticking her tongue out him. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

Her eyes are full of vindictive fire, and he wants to believe her but his head is filled with hospital visits and the scars on her shoulder blades and the way she breathes like life is pain and it’s _all his fault._

“I don’t think that’s worth the times you’ve almost died because of me,” Lucifer mutters, echoing his scattered thoughts. “It would’ve been better if you had just taken Michael’s offer and forgotten about me.”

Natalie meets his eyes, something inscrutable brewing in her expression. It unnerves him; Natalie is endearingly predictable, her thoughts played out on her face with the emotional clarity of a telenovela. It’s not often that he can’t read her.

The unnamable emotion flickering in the corners of her lips smooths out into a tender smile.

“I could never forget you,” she says softly, her voice raspy with sickness. “I love you.”

She doesn’t seem to expect a reply, just leans into him, shuddering as a gust of wind hits her face. Before, in the hospital rooms and the dirty motels and the cocoon of her bedsheets, he could feel the fever in her skin, a burning that was yet to be smothered by the fluid in her lungs.

But on the summit of this precipice overlooking the sea, she’s so, so cold.

He ignores the stinging in his eyes and wraps his arms around her, pulling her closer. She doesn’t comment, keeping silent for once, the quiet space between them heavier than the falling darkness. They stare out into the sea until the dusk fades away to an inky black, stars winking slowly into view.

(She falls asleep soon after that.)

He holds her until the end comes.

* * *

The church is empty when he enters, the sound of his footsteps resounding against the precisely lined pews. The light of the rising sun fractures through the stained glass windows, pitching kaleidoscopic patterns onto the floor. He feels the reverence humming through the air, a soft tension that turns his stomach in knots, rising like bile in his throat. This is very clearly heaven’s domain, and he’s not welcome here.

He sighs and slides into one of the rows. He’s known hurt long and intimately enough now that the ache of this place is a tame one.

“So…” He starts awkwardly, clasping his hands together. “It’s been a while. I mean, there was that one time with Natalie and her old man, but I’m not sure if that really counts.”

He clears his throat. “Dad, I never thought I would say this again, but… I need your help.” His voice echos through the hallowed room, fading slowly into silence.

He drops his gaze to his hands. “There’s something going on and…I don’t know how to stop it.”

He grimaces, his eyes still tracing the lines of his palms. “Time keeps repeating itself. I’ve been living this day over and over again, and Natalie…she keeps dying, every single day. No one can help, or will help, and I guess…I guess you’re my last hope.” He laughs bitterly, shoulders shaking with each breath of air he huffs out.

“I thought that maybe if I could save her it would fix things,” He admits softly, “But…I keep trying as hard as I can to stop it, and nothing’s working. Nothing’s working.”

He stands up. “I don’t care what it takes to fix this. I don’t care if it means that Michael wins, or that I die, or even if I have to give up… _that_. I don’t care, I just can’t live like this anymore, so please, Dad, help me. Tell me what to do.”

He approaches the front of the church and places his hand on the podium, like maybe he can hear a reply in the nicked mahogany. There’s nothing but that ceaseless hum that echoes dully in the pit of his stomach. He closes his eyes.

“Lost cause,” he mutters.

He doesn’t see it when he first turns around, but it catches his eye as he steps down and starts to walk across the aisle. There’s a book lying on the thin carpet, face down.

He crouches over it, tentatively reaching out and grabbing it, pulling it towards him. He studies it with a growing sense of uncertainty. He and his father have not talked in millennia.

He sees the cover and snorts.

“ _The Power of Communication,_ ” He reads, hands curling around the paperback. He looks incredulously at the ceiling. “A little hypocritical, don’t you think?”

He looks down at it again. It’s one of those self-help books, the title in bold font, splashed against a crimson backdrop. “Not the most subtle sign you’ve ever given me, either. So you’re saying I should tell her about this mess?”

There’s no reply, but that’s how it usually is with his Father.

He pauses, his vision lingering on the dyed glass, shards of cold crystal depicting the birth of Christ, the creation of the earth, the war within heaven. The fall. The morning sun splits the red and blue into shattered fractals, like jewels scattered on the ground. His features look so angry, sealed in those images, spitting hellfire at the remaining angels as he sank below the clouds. He barely recognizes it anymore.

He doesn’t see a clock anywhere, but he feels something shift in the universe. It’s time to go.

“Thank you,” he whispers, and closes his eyes.

Maybe, this time, he can save her.


	4. wither (interude)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> something feels off today, and not just because she’s the sickest that she’s ever been. he’s hiding something from her.
> 
> [takes place in the middle of part three]

He’s been acting strange today.

Natalie folds her hands together, staring absently at the way her fingers intersect, curling in on each other. There’s a persistent ache in her chest, right underneath her sternum, like her bones have been sharpened underneath her skin and are threatening to pierce through her as she breathes. She doesn’t tell him that, but the way he looks at her makes her feel like she doesn’t need to.

She’s not stupid. She might be a little naive, a little too willing to trust, but even if if his horns weren’t radiating an aberrant violet she would know something’s wrong. She could never miss the way that he hesitates to meet her eyes, the way he lingers around her but remains strangely distant, lips pressed together in a close-mouthed grimace. She thought he would be able to trust her with his troubles, but he seems to be miles away from her bedroom now, on a far-off island of his own creation.

She swallows, her scratchy throat protesting at even the slightest movement. “So, are we still going to the coast?”

He seems to snap out of his reverie, glancing up at her with still-absent eyes. Sometimes she forgets just how old he is, but he seems to be weighed down by gravity in a way he wasn’t before today. She can see the years in the curve of his spine, the tiredness of his eyes.

It scares her.

“No,” he says dully. “Let’s just stay here and rest.”

* * *

They sit on her bed and watch old movies on her computer until the sun sinks beneath the horizon, the skyline’s hues flaring red and violet until it settles into a deep indigo. She can tell that her poor laptop is reaching the end of its days; the thing is making a strange whirring noise, the bottom of it overheating and burning her bare thighs. The sounds of Fantasia plays softly through her room, orchestral notes ringing in her head as cartoon figures run across the monitor.

Natalie sniffs, leaning her head on Lucifer’s shoulder. His skin is cool against hers; it feels nice. A little unfamiliar; he’s usually so warm. In the winter she would always press her cold hands on his neck and laugh as he jumped and swore at her.

Now it feels warm underneath her own skin, a angry thing that shudders ceaselessly against the suddenly freezing air. It’s like fire, it’s like the water underneath the bridge that seared her skin pink and raw, but this time it’s in her veins. She sucks in a breath, and the air trudges reluctantly into her heavy lungs.

“I might have a fever,” she announces to him, voice cracking.

He looks at her. “Girl, you’ve had a fever for the past week.”

She frowns. Even though her stomach had churned until she had heaved into the toilet and her entire body felt like it had been hit by a particularly large and angry truck, she never felt like she was burning up from the inside out until now.

“It got worse then,” she says, clearing her throat. She hits pause and shifts the laptop over to Lucifer. “I’m gonna go get an ibuprofen.”

She rolls out of her bed, stumbling slightly. She sees his arms shift, set to steady her, and she flashes him a grin, trying not to let a heaving cough break through her teeth. He meets her eyes, something aching inside his carefully put-together expression. There’s something that he’s not telling her. Natalie turns away from him.

She walks to her bathroom, an uncomfortable tingling forming in the base of her throat. The carpet beneath her bare feet scrapes against her skin like thistles, her sweatshirt and pajama shorts suddenly stifling. She closes the door behind her and rips them off, letting the freezing air cool her burning skin.

Natalie sighs, glancing at her reflection in the mirror. Her already pasty face has a sickly yellow tint to it, save for the feverish splotches of red adorning her cheeks. Her body feels like a furnace, her scorching blood locked inside a half-dead shell. She had never thought it would get this bad. Maybe she should get Lucifer to take her to a doctor.

She brings her hands up to stifle a sudden onslaught of coughing, doubling over as she shudders, the churning in her stomach and the relentless pressure in her head increasing. She drops to her knees, resting her arms on the toilet as she hacks up a vile mess of phlegm and a sickening amber fluid. She grimaces into the toilet, inhaling a rattling breath that can’t seem to completely find its way into her lungs.

“Ugh,” she says, leaning back on her heels. Her head pounds, as if the nausea and trouble breathing weren’t bad enough. She presses her palms into the ridge of her eyes, the pressure building inside of her skull. The heat is rising, too; she can feel it underneath her heavy eyes and searing against her cheeks.

She leans her forehead against the cool enamel, vision blurring. It’s strangely comfortable like this, her knees pressed against the floor, torso slumped and arms limp. She could even sleep here, if only for a moment. But not very long; Lucifer’s waiting in her room with her poor, dying laptop. Just for a minute or two… she’ll rest just for a little bit…

She lets her eyes close, giving into the exhaustion and fever burning through her body.

* * *

Something’s shaking her. **  
**

“—atalie?  _Natalie!_ ”

She feels a little irritated at the intrusion. It felt so much better to be asleep…

“Natalie, wake up!”

 _Oh_. She knows that voice.

She feels his hands clutch her bare shoulders and there’s a buzzing, heavy static in the spaces between them. Something warm and alive floats through her veins, smothering the inferno under her skin. Suddenly it’s easier to breathe, and she inhales deeply, rivulets of oxygen pouring into her lungs.

“You said my name,” she mumbles, opening her eyes. Lucifer’s face swims into view, eyes wider than she’s ever seen them.

“Jesus Christ, girl, you looked like a corpse,” he says shakily. His hands are still on her shoulders, anchoring her to the cool tiles on her bathroom floor. Clarity pools back into her mind like warm honey, along with the bone-deep ache that makes her want to curl up and retreat into the safety of slumber.

“I feel like a corpse,” she groans, shifting slightly. She sees his gaze drop to the strangely prominent curve of her ribs; her stomach has been mostly empty for the past two weeks. His expression hardens.

She places a hand on his and guides it off of her shoulder.

“I feel better now, though,” she says, sitting up. “What did you do?”

“I healed you,” he says, pulling back from her. “Temporarily, though; the sickness will come back.”

He hands her sweatshirt to her and she pulls it over her head. She catches a glimpse of his pained face as her head emerges from the fabric.

“What’s gotten into you today?” She asks, narrowing her eyes.

Lucifer recoils slightly, leaning away from her. “I don’t know what you mean, kid.”

“You’ve been acting weird all day. It’s freaking me out, dude,” she says, heaving herself up.

“You don’t get to talk about freaking people out when you just pulled that stunt,” he says, tone suddenly harsh.

“ _What_  stunt?” Natalie asks, mystified.

He gestures to the square of tiles where she had slumped over. “You might have thought to tell me you were feeling bad before you passed out over the toilet.”   
  
“I didn’t know that I was going to pass out!” Natalie says indignantly. “Honestly, Lucifer, what’s going on?”

“You’re  _sick_.”

“ _You’re_  overreacting.”

“I wish you wouldn’t make it a habit of doing stupid things that almost get you killed,” he snaps.

“I wish you wouldn’t make it a habit of keeping secrets from me, but that doesn’t look like its gonna change anytime either,” she fires back.

“Natalie,” he says in a tone so foreign it shocks her out of her anger. “Natalie, please. I need you to trust me on this one, okay?”

“When have I not?” She asks. He stays quiet, and she takes a deep breath, steadying herself. A few moments pass.

“I’m sorry,” he says eventually. “I was just…”

“Worried?” Natalie asks. He nods slowly.

She smiles. “You have a weird way of showing it.”

There’s a strange silence between them, and Natalie stews in it just long enough to collect the thoughts bouncing relentlessly around her head.

“Lucifer, you know I trust you,” She says, tapping her fingers together. She waits for a beat, dragging her eyes up to meet his. “I might not understand what you do and why you do it, but I trust you and I appreciate everything that you’ve done for me. And I always will, because…well, I love you.”

His reaction isn’t the one she expects. He freezes, processing her words, before his shoulders slump and he reaches out to cup her chin, tilting her head to meet her eyes. There’s something there, a strange dichotomy of desperation and passivity that wasn’t present yesterday, or the day before. He looks almost like Titus did when they had their final battle. A man with nothing and everything to lose.

“See?” He says, his voice inexplicably sad. Her breath catches in her throat. “That’s another stupid thing.”

He moves and she feels his lips brush against her mouth, almost chaste save for the way he lingers, like he’s mustering the softest kiss he can manage when all he wants to do is drown in this moment that time can’t seem to touch. She’s stunned, the seconds stretching on before she registers that  _holy shit he’s kissing her_. She shifts her head and presses closer to him, squeezing her eyes shut.

She’s just about to reach for him to drag him nearer when he pulls away, eyes unreadable.

She stands there for a moment, dumbfounded, staring at him with wide eyes and a slightly parted mouth. They stare at each other, the foot of space between them an immense gap, mountainous in comparison to the way they were just connected. She lets her fingers touch the place where his lips once were.

She breaks the silence first.

“You  _kissed_  me,” she says slowly, a grin threatening to curl out of the corners of her mouth. Maybe it’s the fever, but the room feels a little hazy around the edges.

“Stop,” Lucifer says, and to her delight she sees that he’s flushing. 

“You kissed meeeeeeeeee….” she sing-songs, dodging the pillow he throws at her. “You loooooooove meeeeeeeeeee…”

“Girl, I will kill you myself if you don’t stop that.”

“I know you don’t mean that, loverboy,” she says, giggling. She feels giddy, ecstatic, even, her chest swelling in a way that doesn’t make her gasp in pain for once. She glances up at him, his mouth quirked up into the smallest of smiles.

But even that seems hesitant, somehow.

Natalie deflates a little bit. “Seriously,” she says, reaching out to grab his hand, her fingers entangling with his. “I hope you know you can trust me too. You don’t need to do this alone.”

Lucifer sighs. “I know. I’m just…figuring some stuff out, okay?”

She chuckles. “Sounds like one of those cheesy excuses you hear on TV dramas.”

She squeezes his hand before letting hers drop. “Just tell me when you’re ready.”

He nods shortly, his eyes dragging on the ground.

“Do you want to finish the movie?” She asks softly.

He looks up to her. “Whatever you want, kid.”

She smiles, retaking his hand and leading him out of the bathroom. The bed creaks as they lay on it, Natalie shifting aside to make room for him. Her laptop whirs pathetically as she picks it up and sets it on her lap. She presses play, and the sound of cartoons fill the room once more.

She leans back and lays her head on his chest, her eyes already drooping. The aftereffects of Lucifer healing her are already fading, she can tell, and the stifled feeling when she breathes is starting to claw at her lungs.

She feels his hand curl through her hair, his chest rising and falling steadily, and she sighs.

Sick or not, it would be nice, she decides, to stay this way forever.

* * *

She wakes up to the earth turning in on itself, its molten core burning as it crawls over her skin.

The world seems to swirl a little; she can feel the fever pulsing through her veins like a war drum, beating in her ears until it presses against her skull. The lights are starting to pulse too, black dots swimming on the edge of her vision. She squeezes her eyes shut, pressing her head further back into her pillow.

She realizes that there’s a space in the bed where he once laid, and she’s suddenly filled with an immeasurable panic. She reaches out blindly to grab his hand, and to her relief he’s there to catch it, intertwining his fingers with hers.

“Go back to sleep, kid,” he says softly, and she almost doesn’t catch the slight hitch in his breath. She opens her eyes and everything comes into focus, including his face. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen him cry before, but there are tears forming at the corners of his eyes, defeat and exhaustion on every line of his expression.

He’s grieving, she realizes, hunched over her bed like it’s a casket and she’s already a rotting corpse within it.

“I’m dying?” Natalie whispers, her free hand curling around her blankets, gripping her sheets with a sudden, stabbing fear.

Lucifer hesitates, and it’s all the confirmation she needs.

“Yes,” he says eventually, voice quiet, squeezing her hand. “But not for long. I promise. Just go to sleep and in the morning everything will be okay. I’ll save you, Natalie.”

The look in his eyes scares her more than her failing body.

“You better not do anything stupid,” she warns him, curling in on herself as a painful cough climbs through her chest. She feels his fingers comb through her hair, the only bit of comfort he seems to be able to offer. Dark spots creep into her line of sight, suffocating her.

“I’m scared,” she admits, feeling tears sting the corners of her eyes.

“Everything will be okay,” he repeats, as much to himself as to her. She thinks she sees a bit of movement behind him.

She trusts him. She trusts him with her life, with her heart and head and soul and every other piece of her being that she can imagine. And so she repeats it too, as her vision fades into black and the pressure in her lungs increase. She holds onto this last bit of hope, and these words and his hand curling through her hair are the last things she registers as she succumbs to the crushing darkness.

Everything will be okay.


	5. part four

_“And sore must be the storm_  
_That could abash the little bird_  
 _That kept so many warm.”_

> _—Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the Thing With Feathers”_

* * *

_It wasn’t supposed to be this way,_ he thinks amidst the chaos.There’s a numbness running through his veins as he reaches out to grab her hand, fingers trembling, his vision swirling like a hurricane. The water pouring down on them is icy, and he feels her shudder against him as she cries.

“Natalie,” he says weakly, cupping her cheek with his shaking hand. He says it again, a broken litany that spills off his lips and cuts through the pounding water.

“Don’t,” she whispers. He can feel her hot tears dripping onto his skin. “Please, don’t.”

Amidst his swirling, hazy thoughts, he knows that this is it. The end, not in a hailstorm of fire and blood, but in the white of the tiles, the white of her skin, the endless white noise that he feels himself slowly, surely drowning in.

He never wanted it to end like this.

* * *

[8:52 AM]

“So you’re telling me,” Natalie says, bringing her knees to her chest, “that you’re stuck in some sort of…”

“Time loop, yes,” Lucifer confirms.

She leans back against her bedpost, looking at him carefully. Her hair sways loose and vibrant in the morning light, and she absently tucks a few strands behind her ear as she processes his words. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, of course I’m sure,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “I’ve been trapped in this nightmare for way too long for it to be some kind of weird dream.”

There’s a tension in the silence that follows, a string of unspoken words floating in the air. Natalie tilts her head, looking morbidly curious, and lets them fall out of her mouth. “How…how long is way too long?”

He grimaces, his gaze dropping to the hems of sunlight spilling through the curtains and onto her floor. “About a month,” he says. It’s been thirty three days, to be more specific. Seven hundred and ninety two hours. Forty seven thousand, five hundred and fifty minutes, all neatly wrapped up into one tiny loop, an unwanted gift that keeps on giving anyway.

“Jeez,” she breathes, eyes widening. “And this is the first time you’ve told me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He scratches his head, still averting his gaze. He wants to tell her about how he stepped into hallowed grounds of his own accord, had prayed to his father like a stranger and received an answer in return. He wants to tell her that now, there’s a small flicker of hope burning in his stomach, and that it makes him more terrified than he’s ever been.

He wants to tell her everything.

“I… you had worse things to worry about,” he says, biting the words down before he can speak them.

“If it’s the same day, then won’t I still have to worry about them?” She asks, sniffling a little. He grabs the familiar tissue box and hands it to her.

“Not right now,” he says. “Hopefully this will all be over before you need to even think about…that.”

She shifts to fold her legs together, placing her hands on her knees. He’s seen her enough on this day to outline the hollows in her cheeks, her sunken eyes and blanched complexion and the subtle shine of perspiration on her forehead.

“Does it have to do with me being sick?” She asks, ignoring him. She pauses and narrows her eyes at him. “And why are your horns like that?”

“Jesus Christ, give me a break,” he complains, ignoring his clenching heart. “Don’t make me regret telling you about this.”

“You aren’t telling me everything, though,” Natalie says quietly. “You do that a lot.”

“What do you mean?” he says, catching the hurt in her tired eyes and the slight shakiness in her voice.

“What do you think I mean?” She asks, voice pained. “You ask me to trust you, and I do! I promise, I do, but I’m tired of you keeping things from me. I’m your  _best friend_ , Lucifer. I love you, and I’d trust you with my life, so why don’t you trust me?”

“What do you want me to say?” Lucifer snaps back, struggling to keep his voice down. “What do you want me to tell you? That I’ve had to watch you die over and over again with no way of stopping it? That I have no clue how to get us out of this mess? That I’ve tried every hospital, every magic trick, every damn thing that you could possibly think of to save you and I still wake up every morning at 8:24 AM and watch you fade away without a damn clue how to help you?  _Is that what you want to fucking hear?_ ”

He lets the words settle in, gritting his teeth together, ignoring the stinging in his eyes that’s become annoyingly familiar. He inhales, clenching his shaking hands.

Natalie stares at him in complete silence, eyes wide.

Lucidity creeps back into his head as he breathes, his own words echoing back on him, sharper and sharper with every reverberation until the implications of what he’s said finally sink in.

“Shit,” he says shakily. “I—I didn’t mean for you to find out that way.”

She shakes her head, and he’s horrified to see her eyes shining with unshed tears.

“Kid—”

“I’m so sorry.”

He flinches, not expecting those words to come from her mouth. “What?”

“I’m so sorry,” she repeats, voice trembling. “No one should have to go through something like that. That’s so horrible.”

Wait. Was she…

“The fuck?” Lucifer says. “Are you crying for  _me_? Did you miss the part where I said you were  _dying_?”

“No, but…” she says, sniffling, “but you’re the one who has to remember it.”

He stares at her silently, incredulous. She still keeps finding ways to mystify him, even when each second he lives is recycled thirty three times over.

“You’re unbelievable,” he says, echoing his scattered thoughts.

She laughs a little, the air rattling through her throat before turning into a cough, and another, and another. She hunches over, one arm folding around her stomach while the other presses roughly against her lips, stifling the sound. He knows the drill by now, knows the way to sink onto the mattress next to her and place a hand on her back until her body stops trying to force itself out of her skin.

She breathes heavily, tiredly, and leans into him. She burns against his skin.

“Thank you,” she whispers, voice lost in the scratchiness of her throat. “I don’t know why you’re doing all this for me.”

He swallows; he knows where this conversation is going.

“Don’t sweat it, kid,” he deflects. “It’s the least I can do after you cleared up the mess in my head.”

She shakes her head, her hair brushing against his arm. “No, you could’ve left. Even with the time loop thing, you could’ve left and tried to figure this stuff out on your own.”

Natalie looks up at him. “Why didn’t you leave? You love me or something?”

Lucifer is silent. He doesn’t know what to say. How could he bring those words to spill out into the air, living proof of the way his heart is crushing him like glass under pressure? He didn’t realize it at first, that he was handing bite-sized pieces of himself to her, at least not until she faded away and took them all with her.

When he says it, it becomes real, it becomes the way that his world crashes down in front of him with the ceasing of her breath. It becomes the way he feels: achingly, fearfully, terribly. It’s handing her his heart on a silver platter just in time for her to wither to dust.

_You love me or something?_

Of course he fucking does.

“I do, you know,” she says gently. “I love you, Lucifer.”

He’s just too much of a coward to say it.

“…I can’t watch you die again,” he offers, as good of an answer as he can manage. His hand clenches into a fist. “I just can’t, Natalie.”

A small hand covers his curled fingers, and he looks down at them numbly. She waits for him to relax, turn his palm over, before sliding her fingers in between his.  
  
“Then we better find a way to fix this, shouldn’t we?” she says, in that ridiculously optimistic tone of hers. She squeezes his hand, looking up at him with such certainty and trust he almost forgets how many times he’s failed before this.

Almost.

“I told you, I’ve tried everything,” he says bitterly. “It all ends the same.”

Natalie pauses, contemplating, curious.

“What happened the first time that I…?” She doesn’t continue.

Lucifer sighs. “We went to the coast and found Pestilence. I tried to make a deal with her but it didn’t work out.”

“Then we should retrace our steps,” she says simply, standing up. “Go back to when and where it all started.”

“That’s pointless,” he says. “I don’t know how, but she knows about the loop. That makes her unpredictable. I tried to find her again a couple times but she’s skipped town by now.”

“If she knows about the loop then that’s all the more reason to track her down,” Natalie argues. “She may not be in town, but she might still be in the area.”

He doesn’t want to tell her why he’s so reluctant, why he doesn’t want to travel miles and miles to that small coastal town that’s become the bane of his existence. The place where he first lost her in that shitty, dirty motel room. The place where she got sick to begin with. Still, it’s the most logical course of action. He pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers.

“You’re right,” he says tiredly. Of course she is. “Let’s go.”

Natalie nods, walking over to her dresser. “What about my dad?” She asks as she picks through her clothes.

“What do you mean?” He asks.

She looks up at him. “He’s going to notice I’m gone, right?”

Lucifer pauses. “I’ll have one of my followers come and fill in for you, if you want.”

She nods. “I don’t want to worry him. He’s gone through enough already.”

He exhales, reaching for her phone. “Alright, kid.”

He doesn’t mention that the meaning of taking other people into consideration has started to slip past him as the days dragged on and inverted on themselves, the point of existing becoming more and more elusive. When time reflects on itself there are no consequences to worry about, nothing to hide. Nothing to live for.

 _Except for her,_  a small voice in the back of his mind whispers.

He doesn’t know why she’s been an unyielding exception to his apathy. If he thinks about it, she’s always been that way, a thorn in his side that managed to irritate him with a single word, with a sly look, with her very existence. He isn’t sure when annoyance turned into the ache of caring, but without him knowing she had wound herself too tightly around his heart for him to untangle her from it.

“…Lucifer?”

“Hm?” He says, turning to look at her. She seems so concerned, unease inscribed on the lines of her forehead, and he realizes that he’s been standing still, staring at the phone silently for a good minute or so.

He mentally shakes himself.

“Sorry,” he says, the word bitterly familiar rolling off his lips. “Zoned out.”

She forces a laugh, pulling out a pair of light wash jeans. It sounds genuine, but he can see the concern in the red of her eyes, the subtle shift of her hands to her chest, trying to protect what’s underneath her skin.

“It’s kinda worrying,” she says lightly, her gaze fixed on her clothes. She picks out her dark red devil shirt to go with her jeans.

“Well,” Lucifer says, imagining that shirt stained with bile and sweat, attached to a motionless body in a hotel bed, on the floor of a hospital, on the rocky cliff overlooking the sea. “Hell will do that to you. We’ll leave as soon as your stand-in gets here.”

* * *

She was right, on that day in the pool. The devil can’t feel guilt, can’t feel the strange mix of ice and fire and overwhelming nausea that makes his hands tremble and throat swell with all the things he couldn’t fix. The devil can’t choke on the history of things he’s left unsaid, again and again and again. He should be numb to all of this. He shouldn’t be able to feel it.

He feels it anyway.

Not for the first time, he wonders if he’s becoming something else.

* * *

[9:43 AM]

The bus ride up, she’s quieter than usual. She had probably seen the bottle of cheap whiskey underneath Alex’s recliner. He had missed that the first time around, glanced past it like it was nothing. Once, he could see people’s weaknesses like they were neon lights swirling above their head, a weapon that he used whenever he had the chance. The edges of his vision used to be so much sharper.

“I know what you saw,” he says, his voice low and soft so that the rest of the passengers can’t hear them. “I’m sorry.”

Things were easier when he didn’t care.

He hears her inhale, the air seeping into her failing lungs. Something catches on her throat and she coughs, arms coming up to cover her face as she heaves. The bus riders glance at her nervously. They’ve probably seen the news too, keeping their arms close to their sides, not touching anything or anyone. He sees a woman slowly rub sanitizer onto her hands, shooting Natalie a dirty look as she did so. He glowers at her, and his angry, catlike eyes are enough to drive her stare away.

“It’s okay,” she says roughly, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. “Well, it’s not okay. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” She looks down at her knees, eyes still glazed over.

He sighs. “I know it’s hard, but you’re gonna have to focus on one thing at a time, and right now that’s getting you better.”

“But—my dad—”

“Kid, you need to stop trying to fix everyone for once and worry about yourself,” he says roughly, folding his arms. “You remember what’s at stake, right?”

She doesn’t answer him. Instead, she brings her burning gaze to his eyes.

“When all of this is over,” she says softly, “can you help him?”

He pauses. He isn’t even sure if he can help her, let alone her father, but there’s fear in her eyes and her fingers are digging harshly into her old jeans. Lucifer sighs.

“I’ll try,” he promises.

* * *

Condemnation is something that he’s become well-acquainted to; he used to meet it nightly in scummy bars, in pried off wedding rings and booze and the crisp flipping of cards on beer-stained tables. He’s been on every end of it, both victim and arbiter. Throughout the millennia he’s been here, it’s crept into his skin, become a part of him as wholly and completely as his own flesh.

Satan, the adversary. The tempter of man. The condemner of souls.

He should’ve known that he would damn her too.

The water keeps on falling.

* * *

[2:34 PM]

As soon as they get off the bus the smell of the town hits him like a punch to the throat, the scent of tobacco and salt flooding his senses. He’s been here too many times.

“You okay?” Natalie asks.

“Fine,” he replies curtly. “So, in this grand plan of yours, how do you suggest finding Pestilence?”

“She shouldn’t be far,” she says firmly.

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s her job to get people sick, right? But the time loop is making it so that she can’t finish her job here, and if she does, it just resets. She can’t have travelled much from here in the past few hours.”

“That’s true, but regardless of whether she starts the day here she’s moved on from the casino.”

“Aren’t there other ways of gambling besides there?” Natalie asks. “We can just find those places and check them off if she isn’t there.”

“That’s…actually not a bad idea,” he says.

“Glad to be of service,” she says, sticking her tongue out good-naturedly. “There shouldn’t be too many places that she could go, right?”

* * *

Wrong.

“So, there are fifteen possible spots in the area that Pestilence could be at,” he says, squinting down at the piece of paper. It was a bitch to get the bartender to fess up the underground locations, but Lucifer is nothing if not convincing.

Natalie groans. “I thought it would be much less than that.”

“It’s more than what we had before, kid.”

“Can we narrow it down any more?” She asks.

“Well, I doubt she’d be at the casino; she’s been there before.”

“Maybe she’s been jumping to places based on distance? Getting farther away as time passes?” Natalie says.

“Maybe,” he says thoughtfully. “She wouldn’t stay in one spot for more than two or three days. It’s been thirty three, so she’d be at the first or second furthest location by now.”

“What are they?”

“One is an ongoing underground poker tournament. The other is a fighting ring.”

“Like at the bar?” She asks.

He grimaces, Ipos and Sheila’s faces floating to the surface of his thoughts. “Yeah, like at the bar,” he says, turning away. “Let’s go.”

Natalie pauses, biting her lip. “Maybe we should split up and look at both locations. It’ll be faster.”

The idea of her alone, surrounded by scum who would gladly take advantage of her, makes his fingers curl. He whips his head around to face her. “ _Hell no_. Even if you weren’t sick that would still be a terrible idea.”

Her mouth opens slightly in protest, but she seems to think better of it, and shuts it.

He glances at the addresses, scrawled hurriedly on the back of the receipt. “Besides, they’re both in the industrial district. It won’t take that much extra time to go together.”

“Okay, okay, you win,” Natalie says. “Where to?”

“The poker place,” he says. “It’s more likely to be going on in the middle of the afternoon. Plus it’s probably cleaner.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Pestilence doesn’t like germs too much, ironically enough. She’ll be drawn to a place with less blood and sweaty people.”

“That’s weird,” Natalie says, clearing her throat. He simply nods in reply, shoving his hands and the crumpled receipt into his pockets.

“Come on; we don’t have much time,” he says, starting to walk. He hears the soft footfalls of Natalie moving to follow him.

“I know you’re afraid, but I’m not. You’ve always been there to save me,” Natalie says from behind him.

He doesn’t stop walking, but he knows she’ll catch the way he tenses at her words.

“What if I can’t this time?” Lucifer asks quietly. Somewhere along the lines, bravado became something frivolous, meaningless. He can hear the uncertainty in his own voice.

Suddenly she’s beside him, hand reaching out to slip her fingers through the gaps in his.

“We can do this,” she says, and smiles in a way that makes him ache.

* * *

He kissed her, one time around.

He isn’t quite sure why. Maybe the increasing fear that he’d never escape this special brand of hell, the rising knowledge that he had both nothing and everything to lose when the clock hit 8:24 AM. Maybe just to have that memory to keep, even if she never would. As he pulled away from her, she looked at him with something that seemed strangely like awe.

She brought her hand up to her mouth, as if she could still feel the pressure of his there, lingering on her skin.

“You kissed me,” she had said, a smile playing on her lips. It was one of the few that wasn’t a grimace or a feeble attempt to convince him that she wasn’t burning up from the inside out.

He holds onto that. Her smile. Her words. Her voice.

A reminder to stay, for her sake.

* * *

[3:32 PM]

The whole place smells like old smoke, dust clinging to the heavy curtains pulled over the windows. Tables are scattered around the warehouse, figures huddled tightly around them. He squints through the harsh fluorescent lighting, eyes darting from one player to the next.

Natalie places a hand cautiously on his arm. “What do we do?” She whispers.

He doesn’t answer, his gaze still flitting across the open room. A flash of white catches his eye, and he sees her, still wearing that dress, just like she did over a month ago. He sucks in a deep breath.

“She’s here. Let’s go,” he says, starting to walk, towing Natalie along with him.

The edges of his vision are blurry; all he can see is that platinum hair, the sway of her dress as she places a card down. Distantly, he registers the security guards hovering around the tables, but he doesn’t slow as he approaches the group of players in the corner of the warehouse.

“Keens!” he yells. Natalie jumps.

She slowly turns to him, a smirk on her face. “Hello, Stan. You’ve found me.”

“You weren’t hard to find. All we needed to do was follow your filthy trail to the nearest gambling place and lo and behold, here you are,” he says, seething.

“You sound angry, Stan,” she says. “Was it something I said?”

_Nothing you do is going to stop this, Lucifer. There’s no point. Your pretty little friend is just going to keep dying, and you’re going to have to deal with it._

“We need to talk to you,” he says, ignoring her query.

“I’d love to, but I’d like to finish this game first,” she says lightly, glancing back at the other players. “It’s been a boring month and I just got here.”

She’s taunting him, he knows, but it doesn’t stop him from seeing red. His closed fist slams down onto the table, its legs snapping and collapsing in on themselves. The other players shout out in alarm; chips fly everywhere, landing on the ground with sharp clacks. The cards fall like a hailstorm, sliding across the floor and glimmering in the harsh lighting.

“Game over, Conquest,” he says roughly, shrugging off the guards trying to grab him. “We’re going.”

She sighs, standing up. “Let’s go to the back room.” She glances at the other players, scrambling to pick up their chips. “Sorry, boys, if you’ll excuse me.”

She whispers something to a security guard, and he nods, backing away. She raises an eyebrow at him. “You could have gotten me to come with you without causing a ruckus.”

“Force of habit,” he says curtly, following her as she turns away from him. “You know I’m not good at doing things quietly.”

The back room isn’t much more than a closet, unfurnished and dimly lit by a single hanging light. Pestilence folds her arms. “So. What are you gambling this time around, Lucifer?”

“Gambling?” Natalie echoes.

“I’m not gambling anything,” Lucifer says, an answer to both of them. “I want to trade.”

“Oh?” Pestilence says, eyes narrowing. “You do realize that Ipos’ book isn’t valuable enough to trade for something as big as what you’re asking for.”

“Who said I was talking about Ipos’ book?” He says, heart beating a little faster.

Her lip quirks up into a half smile. “Elaborate.”

He takes a deep breath, fighting to keep his hands from trembling. “I know what you’re looking for, and I’m willing to give them to you in exchange for the girl’s health.”

Natalie jerks her head up to look at him. “Dude, you never said anything about a  _trade_ —”

“Are you serious?” Pestilence asks, her expression shifting to one of…pity? “Are you seriously telling me that you’re willing to give up your—”

“Yes, I’m serious,” he interrupts. “I would give up anything at this point to get out of this fucking loop.”

He gestures to Natalie. “Her being sick has something to do with this—the days repeating.”

Pestilence chews on her bottom lip, digesting his words. Finally, she sighs. “As much as I would love to collect… _that_ , it’s not going to be much use.”

“What do you mean?”

“Regardless of whether I cure her or not, the day is just going to repeat itself when the morning comes around. I won’t have my prize, and she’ll be sick again.”

“But—the time loop—”

“It’s not centered around her being  _sick_ , Lucifer. Think about it. What is this loop really revolving around? Why are you and I the only ones that are aware of it? Who would want to do this to you?”

Who would want to do this to him? If he’s being honest with himself, a lot of people. At the very least someone with a sick sense of humor. Someone who would be just as powerful, if not more so, than Pestilence. Someone who chose to center this loop around Natalie being sick… No, not just being sick, Natalie being at her  _sickest_ , Natalie withering away, Natalie dying, Natalie’s death…

Death…

Holy  _fuck_.

“I should have fucking  _known_ ,” he snarls, his hands coming up to tear at his hair. Natalie flinches. “That pathetic bag of bones, of course he would fucking do this.”

Death. The reason that the day restarted at 8:24 AM was because it was the time that Death came to collect her soul. Those figures that he’d been seeing as the sun rose weren’t grief-induced hallucinations.  _Fuck_ , he’d been so blind.

“Lucifer, what’s going on?” Natalie asks.

“It’s Death,” he says through gritted teeth. “It’s been Death this entire time and I was too fucking stupid to realize it.”

Pestilence nods, almost smugly. “Took you long enough.”

He rubs at his temples impatiently. “I’m going to fucking murder him. I’m going to bash that flimsy skull in until it’s dust.”

Pestilence snorts. “Charming. Even if you can find him, I doubt he would let you live long enough to get in a second hit.”

“How…how do we find him?” Natalie asks, her voice shaky. He glances at her face, pale for reasons other than sickness for the first time in a while.

“Well, the fastest way is to kill someone,” Pestilence says flippantly. “He’s usually there within the hour.”

Natalie winces. “Uh…I don’t really want to kill anyone.”

“Then,” Pestilence says, “your best bet is to speed up the process.”

Natalie tilts her head. “Of what?”

Instead of answering, Pestilence looks at Lucifer expectantly. “If you want to confront Death, someone needs to die. I see one obvious candidate.”

He stares at her quizzically, until it hits him with the relentless force of a freight train. She isn’t seriously telling him to…

“Lucifer?” Natalie asks, staring uneasily at him. “What’s she saying?”

“She’s saying that I should kill you,” he whispers, not taking his eyes off of the woman in front of him. His hands start to shake. “After everything I did for her, after  _everything I was willing to do for her_ , you can’t seriously expect me to turn around and murder her in cold blood.”

Pestilence shrugs. “It’s the most logical course of action.”

“Like hell it is!” He snaps. “What if by some odd happenstance Death decides to make this the last loop and she stays dead? There’s not a  _fucking_  chance, Pestilence.”

“Kill someone else then; I’m sure it won’t make a difference.”

“Then maybe I should start with you,” he hisses, taking a step towards her. Pestilence holds her stare, unimpressed.

“…Maybe she has a point,” Natalie says from behind him. He freezes for a moment before feeling floods back into his limbs.

“What the hell, girl? Do you have a death wish?” He demands, turning to her. “Do you not understand the part of her plan where you  _die_?”

“I mean, I do,” she says. “It’s just that you need to talk to Death in order to get out of this, and I don’t want you to kill anyone else.”

She sounds so apologetic. He almost wants to laugh at the absurdity of it because this is  _her_  life,  _her_  soul that they’re talking about and she’s feeling sorry for  _him_?

He shakes his head. “No dice, kid; I’m not gonna hurt you. I’d rather rot in this loop for the rest of eternity. We’ll find another way.” He turns to Pestilence. “Thanks for nothing.”

She smiles. “When you get out of this loop…come back to me with that offer.”

“Sure won’t,” he lies, and turns away.

* * *

It’s too much. He can’t stay like this.

He gasps, feeling the energy leaving his body.  
  
“Don’t you dare, Lucifer,” she says, her voice strangely distant. “Please, you need to stop. Please, don’t.”

“I need to,” he begs her. He can count on one hand the number of times that he’s prayed in the last millennia, but each time, it’s been for her. He’s paralyzed and the world is fading away in his hands and he prays. God, he prays until his skin is burning from the holiness and his heart feels like it’s about to burst from his chest and onto the polished tiles of the bathroom floor.

Her name. Over and over. He sends it to his father and remembers the hope he once had, now a black hole unfurling in his stomach.

It’s too late for prayers.

* * *

[4:09 PM]

They exit the warehouse, the sunlight blinding in comparison to the unnaturally lit poker rooms. Natalie huffs, looking a little worse for the wear.

“Are you okay, kid?”

“I don’t know,” she replies. “Breathing feels really weird right now.”

“We’ll get you some medicine before we figure this out,” Lucifer says, running an impatient hand through his hair. They’re running out of time.

“You know…” Natalie says, her tone cautious, and he raises a hand to halt her.  
  
“No.”

“You didn’t even listen to what I was gonna say!” She says indignantly.

“I didn’t have to,” he says. “I’m not going to do it.”

“But I’m going to die anyway! Wouldn’t it make more sense to just get it over with so maybe you have a chance of getting out of this?” She asks. She stops to cough violently into her arm, almost retching as she doubles over. She looks up with a challenge in her eyes, daring him to say something.

Lucifer takes a deep breath.

“I don’t care if it makes more sense,” He says, voice shaking. “I wouldn’t care if it’s the only fucking way that I get out of this. I’m not going to do it. We’re going to find out another way to summon Death, and then I’m going to make him fix this.”

Natalie stares at him, scrutinizing. She sighs.

“Fine,” she concedes, her expression relaxing. “Let’s go get some medicine then. My head is killing me—no pun intended, haha.”

“Not funny,” he mutters, shoving his hands in his pockets.

* * *

[4:31 PM]

Natalie clutches the plastic bag, probably filled with every medication under the sun. “This should be good,” she says, peering in at its contents.

“Good,” he says. “Take it and we’ll be on our way.”

“Can’t we get a hotel room or something?” She asks. “I’m really tired.”

“A hotel…room?” He asks, his thoughts going back to that God-forsaken motel. He sees the muted wallpaper, the smell of dust and cigarettes and the slight taste of death in the air as the sun streamed in through the curtain gaps. He sees the crop of her hair sprawled onto the pillow, lips parted with a breath that would never come.

She inhales one now, the air scraping against her throat like sandpaper. “Please.”

Her hands are shaking a little bit, skin still locked on a sickly pallor that emphasizes the hollows of her cheeks, the irritated red splotches under her eyes and nose.

He exhales. “Alright.”

* * *

[4:54 PM]

He picks a different hotel this time, the Cypress Inn, it’s white columns and abundance of potted plants a notch above the last one they stayed at.

Natalie collapses onto the queen size bed in their room, letting out a heaving cough. “I want to sleep,” she groans into the duvet, sinking deeper into it.

“You okay, kid?” He asks, sitting down by her. She’s never mentioned being tired around this time before today, but he supposes that it’s not too surprising; she’s been in a constant state of exhaustion ever since she got sick.

“Yeah,” she replies, her voice muffled. She flips onto her back, her hair shining like copper against the white comforter. She rests a hand on her forehead, staring at the ceiling like it’s an intricate puzzle she needs to solve. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Are you sure I can’t just find some low-life—”

“I’m sure,” she says firmly, interrupting him. “We’ll find another way.”

He sighs, hauling himself up and moving to the door. “Alright, then. I’m going to take a walk and figure this shit out. You stay here and rest.”

She nods from her position on the bed, and he feels a surge of anxiety engulf him as he opens the door. He hesitates. Something doesn’t feel right about this.

It’s only five, though, he reminds himself. The sun is still shining; they have plenty of time to figure something out.

Lucifer shakes himself to reality, closing the door behind him. He wanders around the edge of the stucco building, breathing in the salt-laden air, the sun filtering through the grove of trees arching around the inn.

_What are we going to do?_

He exhales heavily, running a hand through his hair. He honestly can’t see another way to summon Death besides…well, killing someone. It wasn’t necessarily something he was averse to, but the way Natalie looked at him when he was threatening Pestilence…she looked terrified. But even beyond that, she looked  _disappointed_.

_I wouldn’t be best friends with a monster!_

“Get out of my head,” he mutters, the static feeling of fear coming alive in his chest.

He’s so tired. He can feel this month weighing him down more than he’s ever been, heavy stones that he can’t even fathom to shake off.

He knows that he shouldn’t feel this way; his father told him that he could fix this. There still has to be a sliver of hope that can get them out of this. To heal her.

Healing her. Maybe he should have started with that.

Because to make her better, they would need…

He groans.  _Pestilence_. He’s getting really sick of that smug bitch. But it would give them more time and one less thing for him to worry about, albeit at a hefty price.

When Michael ripped the first set out, the phantom pains haunted him for years. Even now, he can feel the ache of where they once rested between his shoulder blades. If the last two sets were taken…he can’t even imagine…

He looks up; the sun has dropped further, only hours away until it would be cradled on the horizon. There’s still a chance that Pestilence would be at the warehouse. He clenches his fist. It’s a blow to his pride to go back so soon, and a mar on his existence to give up…  _that_ … but at least he wouldn’t have to sit with this guilt for the remainder of his days.

He doesn’t know if he could live with that.

* * *

[5:49 PM]

When he gets back to the hotel, he swings the door open to an empty room, the dull sound of rushing water flowing from the bathroom. He sits down on the bed, crossing his legs.

“Don’t take too long; we’re going back to the warehouse,” he announces to the door. “We have something important to do and I wanna get it over with.”

She doesn’t reply, and he sighs, standing back up. 

“Did you hear me?” He asks, raising his voice.

All he can hear is the muffled flow of the shower head on the other side.

He frowns, and walks over to the bathroom. He knocks on the wooden frame. “Girl? You okay?”

Still no response. A prickle of anxiety starts to brew in his chest.

He can feel his hands start to shake as he knocks again, more insistently this time. “Natalie?”

He reaches to try the doorknob, but it’s locked. “Natalie!”

The fear is back, surging forward and capturing him in its inescapable depths as he pounds on the door again. She isn’t making a sound; all he can hear is the taunting noise of the running water and his fist slamming against wood. He hits it again and the door splinters with the force, slamming open and hitting the wall with a sharp crack. He stumbles forward into the bathroom, searching for her with wild eyes. And he sees her.

She’s propped against the wall of the shower, the water soaking her hair and clothes, eyes closed and face as white as sheet. She looks dead.

For one numbing moment, he stands, frozen.

Sensation flows back into his limbs and suddenly he’s dropping to his knees in front of her, confusion and panic cascading through his veins. She isn’t supposed to be this bad. Why did she get so bad so quickly?

“Natalie, wake up.” He grips her shoulders, nails digging desperately into her skin. Her hazy eyes flicker open, drawing in a choking breath. “What’s wrong? What did you do?”

Her eyes flutter closed again, and he jerks her to him. “ _Natalie_.”

The shine of plastic catches on the edges of his vision, and he turns to it, dread pooling in his stomach.

The medication she bought. The pill bottles. They’re empty.

His heart drops, and he turns back to her with a renewed desperation, understanding exactly what she did.

He thinks back to Oregon, how she flew off that bridge without hesitation, plummeting to the water below. Back to the warehouse, when she offered up her soul like it was a piece of meat to be devoured by the monsters lurking inside of him. And now this, the third time she’s been willing to self-destruct for something as simple as his comfort.

“You can’t do this,” he says, “You can’t do this to me.”

Her mouth opens, drawing in a ragged breath. “I’m doing this  _for_  you, dummy,” she says, her words garbled, shoving him weakly away.

“No—”

“Pestilence…is right,” She says, blood draining from her face at an alarming rate. “You need time to talk to Death…best way to do that is to let me…earlier than planned…”

“No, no—”

“Give you time.”

“ _No_.”

His fingers fly to her cold lips, trying to force their way into her throat and choke all those pills out of her. She clamps her teeth together, eyelids heavy but determined, and if not for his pounding heart splintering into his veins and cutting the sound out of his vocal chords he would have screamed until his throat was raw. Her lips are closed like she’s holding her breath, and his own comes out in broken, staggered words.

“No—no—please—”

He clutches her hand, squeezing so hard she winces. Squalls of freezing water pour over them like a hurricane, and she shudders under the showerhead.

“Natalie,” he begs, his hand cupping her cheek. She’s so stubborn it hurts, keeping poison jailed inside her until she drowns in the drugs and the illness and the icy water. “Natalie.” He tries to shove his fingers down her throat again, and she turns her head away.  
  
“Don’t,” she whispers, starting to cry. “Please, don’t.”

“I’m supposed to save you,” he says, voice lost. “I was supposed to save you this time around.”

“You still can,” Natalie mumbles. “I know you will. Just need to…. just need to get out of this mess first.”

No, no. This isn’t happening. He can still save her. He can still heal her.

And he tries; he gasps as he feels the energy leaving his body and flowing into her.  
  
“Don’t you dare, Lucifer,” she says, voice slurring, and pushes him away. “Please, you need to stop. Please, don’t.”

“I need to,” he pleads back, but he knows it’s not working; the cocktail of drugs and the crushing illness being forced on her lungs are eating up his energy like it’s nothing. Her eyes flutter shut.

 _Too late,_  something whispers in the back of his mind.

He draws his limited energy into his hand and presses it against her chest. She convulses, back arching up, before collapsing in on itself and falling onto the white plastic. Her eyes stay closed.

“No, this isn’t fair, Natalie—Natalie!”

Again, he sends a burst of light like a shockwave into her heart. Her muscles tense but still as he removes his hand. She’s not breathing. Her head arcs back, baring her throat to the ceiling.

He places his ear on her sternum.

Through the thrum of water falling on the tiles, he can’t hear a beat.

“Y-You’re kidding me,” he says to her, shaking her. “Natalie. Wake up.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He never wanted it to end like this.

“Wake up.”

He pulls her to him, cradling her head. Her eyes are sealed shut, mouth slightly parted, amber fluid leaking out of the corner of her lips. She must’ve thrown up before he found her.

“Wake up,” he pleads, tucking a strand of soaked hair behind her ear. “I was supposed to save you, kid. Wake up, please.”

But of course, she doesn’t.

He feels a part of himself break all over again.

* * *

_Once upon a time, he could destroy empires and feel nothing as they burned away to ash._

_He misses that, sometimes._

* * *

Later, he carries her to the hotel bed, the water clinging to their clothes seeping into the mattress. She’s already so cold, a stark contrast to how she was burning up just hours ago. How she was for the past thirty three days. He holds her, bunching his hands in her waterlogged sweatshirt. Through the window, the sun drops beneath the horizon, light melting out of the cloudless sky. It almost seems peaceful, save for the way that he feels like grief is eating away at his lungs.

He grips her tighter.

A familiar voice breaks the silence.

“I can’t believe this. Even watching you suffer gets boring after a while.”

Lucifer keeps staring out the window as he sets Natalie down on the pillows, as gently as he can manage.

“How the fuck did you manage to pull this off?” He whispers hoarsely, turning around to face the rider of the pale horse.

“I called in a favor from an old friend,” Death says casually, leaning against a wall. “Time is always giving me souls, and in return I give it meaning. I can bend it as I wish. We have a healthy, symbiotic existence together.”

He smiles, teeth clacking together.

“Unlike you and poor Natalie over there.”

Lucifer stiffens.

“She gave up so much for you, and what do you give her as thanks?” Death continues, unfolding his arms. “Nothing, except…Well, you see how your friendship played out in her favor.” He gestures towards her lifeless body.

Blood rushes into his head, prickling like a thousand needles stabbing into his skin.

“Just kill me,” he says, and if  _he_  can hear the slightly crazed tone in his voice, Death certainly can as well. “Just kill me, and bring her back, and leave her out of it.”

Death seems to consider it, but shrugs. “Tempting, but I’m not done with you yet.”

“ _What do you fucking mean?_ ” Lucifer hisses, reaching to grab him by his stupid cloak. “What else can you fucking  _do_  to me?”

“Get your hands off me, asshole!” Death says, shoving him away. “Time loops are getting awfully dull and  _you’re_  getting even more boring. I think I might just start fresh, wipe your memory and let the cards fall as they may.”

He turns to leave, his cloak catching the air around his skeletal legs.

“Wait,” Lucifer demands.

Death stops, still facing the door.

“I told you that you can kill me. I’m giving you my head on a silver platter and you’re just going to  _leave_? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Death turns back to him, a gaping, hollow grin splitting his face in two. “Why would you think I would leave for good, Lucifer? I have so many other games I’d like to play with you.” He pauses. “I think Russian roulette sounds fun.”

Lucifer automatically takes a step back, clenching his fists until his palms start to bleed.

“Just set it back,” he whispers. “You can have my life. Just make it go away.”

If possible, Death’s smile gets wider.

“Now you’re speaking my language. I’ll see you tomorrow, Lucifer.” He turns to leave. “Not that you’ll know it.”

“Wait—”

He doesn’t get to finish, because as Death walks away something shifts and suddenly he and the hotel room and Natalie’s body are all gone, the universe turning on it’s side like a spinning coin, time and memories slipping through his fingers like reversing gears, muffled words wisping through his head like gusts of wind.

_Wake up. Please._

_If I were you, I would just kill myself and end it already._

_I can’t leave her._

_I love you._

_I love you._

_I love you._

_Natalie._

* * *

[8:24 AM]

There’s a strange ache in his chest when he wakes up, and he doesn’t know why.


End file.
